How Buddhist Practice Grounds Social Action in a Secular World

Religions, 2022

Our twenty-first century global society is in critical condition, with intertwined symptoms including ecological deterioration verging on ecosystem collapse; polarization of the human community across racial, ethnic, religious, ideological, and other lines, triggering violent conflicts on different levels; and gross inequality in economic status and opportunity, with many needlessly losing their lives due to hunger and malnutrition, and impoverished multitudes consigned to living in dehumanizing conditions. Taking the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha as a therapeutic approach to our dis-eased human condition, we examine symptoms of our Earth community’s severely disjointed condition, tracing their root causes to the three poisons of greed, ill will, and delusion, as manifested in the personal and in the collective, structural/institutional levels of our being. Eradication of these causes would usher in a wholesome and sustainable way of life for us all. The Buddha’s Eightfold Path is...

Integral Review, 2012

I welcome you to this issue of Integral Review. This is our second special issue from the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Symposium on Integral Consciousness. Integral Review is glad to deepen our association with CIIS with the continuation of these special issues. We believe they enrich the range of perspectives and thought available to the growing scholarly community making use of IR. As the value and contribution of integral thought continues to expand into the academic world, we are grateful to be able to continue publishing works like those found in this issue. We are also grateful for and wish to acknowledge the work of Bahman Shirazi in continuing to take on the responsibility for guiding the articles presented here through the editorial process. I will leave you now to take in his introductory remarks, and hope you enjoy reading through this issue.

Rafael Domingo and Gonzalo Rodriguez-Fraile, Amazon, Madrid, Miami, 2022

In Spiritualizing Humanity, the authors aim to help readers to achieve inner peace and regain it quickly should they lose it. They contrast two very different ways of understanding reality and living one’s life: one centered on the ego, and the other on the soul. The first is a source of individual and collective conflict. The second is more spiritual in nature and a source and wellspring of peace and harmony for both the individual and society. The authors argue that if our society is to achieve the lasting peace it yearns for, we as human beings must spiritualize ourselves individually and collectively. Spiritualizing one’s self is to view ourselves from the summit of the soul and operate from this vantage point always. It involves first perfecting and then transcending the ego. It is only from the soul that life attains its fullness and that we come to understand why all that happens to us is for our own personal development and benefit. Then, and only then, does peace become enduring and unshakeable. Spirituality affects all areas of human life, how we live in a family, how we treat others, how we resolve conflicts, even how we run a multinational corporation – and much more. Quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and anthropology, to name a few of the scientific disciplines, are showing us how multidimensional human beings and the universe are, and how they need to be interconnected. It is up to spirituality to give full meaning and unity to the human condition, integrating and transcending the world of matter. If humanity freely decides to choose the path of spirituality, love and peace, we can expect to attain a more united and better functioning global community; a healthier planet that is cleaner and more tenderly cultivated as the garden of God’s creation, and a freer and more peaceful human society than before, comprised of individuals living in union with God and each other.

This paper argues that effective compassionate action must address two kinds of human cause of suffering. The first kind, pointed out by Buddhist epistemology, are universal human tendencies of misperception and mis-reaction, tendencies of delusion, greed, and ill-will. The second kind of cause of suffering, pointed out by Christian liberation theologies, are socioeconomic systems which incorporate individuals into structures of inequity that organize resources and ways of knowing in oppressive ways. Effective contemplative practice is essential to address the first cause of suffering: deluded misperception and reaction, since social analysis alone does not remove the pervasive, unconscious misperception that some persons matter more than others, a misperception that distorts anyone's attempt to build better social systems. Contemplative practices (from various spiritual traditions) that deconstruct that delusive tendency can also empower human capacities of discernment, love, compassion, peace, courage and creative responsiveness essential for effective work for social change. On the other hand, social analysis is essential to address the second kind of cause of suffering, oppressive social structures, which, if not addressed, promulgate systemic patterns of harm while socially conditioning individuals into the first cause of suffering: delusion, greed and ill-will. Contemplative practice that lacks social analysis may also prop up oppressive structures, by improving people's ability to tolerate, but not to challenge, those structures. The conclusion is that neither contemplative practice nor social analysis alone effectively addresses enough man-made causes of suffering. Each must inform and empower the other to provide what is necessary for effective compassionate action.

2020

In the 1920s, Alfred North Whitehead presented his findings on the dire consequences of modern Cartesian bifurcation and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. In the 2020s, with Divine Qualities, like Beauty-Goodness-Truth, disqualified, verifications through measurements are now the only authorisations considered in many settings. Now, for many scientists, only measurements count; for many economists, only profits count; for many politicians, only the polling numbers count. Thus, we externalize people, life on our planet, and Divine Qualities from our current considerations. Now, wherever we live on our precious planet, we see life on earth under increasing stress, as clean air, fresh waters, and fertile soils continue to be turned into dirty air, polluted waters, and wasted soils, degrading and destroying the habitats of many plants, many animals, and many human beings. Since the 1970s, neoliberal policies have powered economic growth with heartless greed, producing wealth supremacies for economic elites, with the wellbeing of countless people degraded and with life on our planet paying shocking unsustainable prices. So, we ask here: can we change from body-mind heartlessness into fully alive Heartfulness (One-in All, All-in-One) in our tripartite Kosmos (Tribhuvana in Vedic East, Rūḥ/‘Aql-nafs-jism in Arabic, Pneuma/Nous-psyche-soma in Greek, Spiritus/Intellectus-anima-corpus in Latin, and Heart-soul-body in English)? More simply, can human beings learn to love each other, thrive with each other and all living beings, in relative harmony and shared peace on our one shared finite planet? In this presentation, we try to hold various people with life-affirming values in Primal, Oriental and Semitic Traditions, Modern Sciences, Postmodern (critiques of modern) and Metamodern (modern + postmodern) Schools, ALTOGETHER. To truly address our various interacting personal, inter-personal, economic, socio-political, and ecological crises, at local, national, and global scales, we need to become deeply grounded in our common Heart-centred humanity. To regenerate life on our one shared planet, we need everybody to learn to thrive in Heart-soul-body within the finite ecological thresholds of our planet’s various habitats-matrices, and we need everybody to inhabit secure social foundations with fair social allocations for everybody with everybody in shared practices of inter-generational justice across all current and future generations of all living beings. We hope, especially for our younger generations, that we can do so.

Buddhist-Christian Studies, 2014

2019

Buddhist approach to healthcare has been of immense value and the scholars have been studying the different places in Tripitaka and many other discourses or Suttas that contain the value of health and well-being. The modern psychologists such as William James, Carl Jung and Eric Fromm too have identified the philosophical perspective of Buddhism on healthcare. Buddha preached that if a person controls his mental, physical and verbal behaviour most of his evils will not be active. The impure body causes many illnesses even though the INSIDE evilness is hidden to the outside world. As the society at present is seen, it is understood that almost all the individuals suffer from various illnesses mainly because they have not been able to control their mind and body. The main research issue in conducting this study was to find out how the Buddhist approach to health and well-being for individuals can establish a sustainable society. The researcher wanted to achieve the following objective...

2021

The increasing attention given to spiritual and holistic healing practices led to their commercialization and commodification, which then changed them to consumption products. Humans of the 21st century seek healing services and buy objects to improve their minds, body, and soul and heal their afflictions. There is an abundance of conflicting literature that analyzes how formalization through commodification affected spirituality and wellness from a Western perspective. This leaves the non-Western view understudied. In this chapter, I outline how Egyptians, who seek those types of services, perceive the different modalities and their abundance and make meanings of their decisions, which helps introduce a classical sociological debate that critiques the availability and abundance of spiritual services. I then juxtapose these ideas, such as the spiritual supermarket, against their critics who support the accessibility of such services and view them as having a positive impact on the greater good. I position myself with the critics of the spiritual supermarket by showing how credentialism and commodification, although available, are hard work. I do this by using my interlocutors' voices of spiritual and energy workers and facilitators and my own experiences. These experiences underline another layer of my critique to the critique of availability and accessibility, where I argue that New Age thinkers tend to over-ritualize these practices conceptually to question ritual efficacy even if individuals do not relate to these modalities as rituals. This also resonates with collective and individualistic performances of spirituality where different people from different cultures carry out similar activities and buy products that reflect certain beliefs and affiliations. I end this chapter by arguing that instead of using Marxist and modernist ideological explanations, it is more holistic and encompassing that theorists analyze the discursive nuances, and the meanings people hold, in the Foucauldian sense, when researching spirituality and how it relates to economics, careerism, commodification, and capitalism.