Socially Engaged Buddhism

Abstract

The University of Hawai‘i Press has long been noted for its scholarly publications in, and commitment to, the field of Asian Studies. The present volume is the fifth in a series initiated by the Press in keeping with that commitment, Dimensions of Asian Spirituality. It is a most appropriate time for such a series. A number of the world’s religions—major and minor—originated in Asia, continue to influence significantly the lives of almost half of the world’s peoples, and should now be seen as global in scope, reach, and impact, with rich and varied resources for every citizen of the twenty-first century to explore. Religion is at the heart of every culture. To be sure, cultures have also been influenced by climate, geology, and the consequent patterns of economic activity they have developed for the production and distribution of goods. Only a very minimal knowledge of physical geography is necessary to understand why African sculptors largely employed wood as their medium while their Italian Renaissance brethren usually worked with marble. But while necessary for understanding cultures—not least our own—matters of geography and economics will not be sufficient. Wood and marble are also found in China, yet Chinese sculptors carved Confucian sages, Daoist immortals, and bodhisattvas from their materials, not chiwaras or pietas. In the same way, a mosque, synagogue, cathedral, stupa, and pagoda may be equally beautiful, but they are beautiful in different ways, and the differences cannot be accounted for merely on the basis of the materials used in their construction; their beauty, their ability to inspire awe and to invite contemplation, rests largely on the religious view of the world—and the place of human beings in that world—that inspired and is expressed in their architecture. Thus the spiritual dimensions of a culture are reflected significantly not only in art and architecture, but in music, myths, poetry, rituals, customs, and patterns of social behavior as well; it follows that if we wish to understand why and how members of other cultures live as they do, we must understand the religious beliefs and practices to which they adhere. In the first instance, such understanding of the “other” leads to tolerance, which is surely a good thing; much of the pain and suffering in the world today is attributable to intolerance, a fear and hatred of those who look, think, and act differently. But as technological changes in communication, production, and transportation shrink the world, more and more people must confront the fact of human diversity in multiply diverse forms—both between and within nation-states—and hence there is a growing need to go beyond mere tolerance of difference to an appreciation and celebration of it. Tolerance alone cannot contribute substantively to making the world a better—and sustainable— place for human beings to live, the evils attendant on intolerance notwithstanding and not to be minimized. But in an important sense, mere tolerance is easy because it is passive: I can fully respect your right to believe and worship as you wish, associate with whomever, and say what you will simply by ignoring you; you assuredly have a right to speak but not to make me listen. Yet for most of us who live in economically developed societies or are among the affluent in developing nations, tolerance is not enough; ignoring the poverty, disease, and gross inequalities that afflict fully a third of the human race will only exacerbate, not alleviate, the conditions responsible for the misery that generates the violence becoming ever more commonplace throughout the world today. Some would have us believe that religion is—as it supposedly always has been—the root cause of the violence and therefore should be done away with. This negative view is reinforced by invoking distorted accounts of the cosmologies of the world’s religious heritages and pointing out that they are incompatible with much that we know of the world today from science. These negative accounts, now increasing quantitatively as their quality declines, also suffer from a continued use of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions of the West as a template for all religions, one ill-suited to the particularities of the several Asian spiritual traditions. Despite the attacks on religion today, it should be clear that they are not going to go away; nor should they. Those who see only the untoward influences—influences not to be ignored—are taking “a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal,” to quote William James. Worse than that, to point the finger at religion as responsible for most of the violence worldwide today is to obscure a far more important root cause: poverty. On this view, the violence will cease only when the more fortunate among the peoples of the world become active, not passive; take up the plight of the less fortunate; and resolve to create and maintain a more just world—a resolve that requires a full appreciation of the co-humanity of everyone, significant differences in religious beliefs and practices notwithstanding. Such appreciation should not, of course, oblige everyone to endorse all of the beliefs and practices followed by adherents of other religions, just as one may object to certain beliefs and practices within one’s own faith. A growing number of Catholics, for instance, support a married clergy, the ordination of women, recognition of rights for gays and lesbians, and full reproductive rights for women. Yet they remain Catholics, believing that the tenets of their faith have the conceptual resources to bring about and justify these changes. In the same way, we can also believe—as a number of Muslim women do—that the Quran and other Islamic theological writings contain the conceptual resources to overcome the inferior status of women in many Muslim countries. And indeed we can believe that every spiritual tradition has within it the resources to counter older practices inimical to the full flourishing of all the faithful—and of the faithful of other traditions as well.