Tag: Dalai Lama

Celebrating Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s Legacy, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm

 

Martin Luther King Jr, at a press conference / World Telegram & Sun photo by Walter Albertin, 8 June 1964. No known copyright restrictions

One Hundred Contemporary Exemplars of Peace Advocacy and Activism: The First Fifty

by Kathie Malley-Morrison & Anthony J. Marsella

During this week, while we are honoring one of America’s greatest heroes, a man who personified many of the highest ethical values for which human beings can strive, we want to honor other activists promoting peace, social justice, and preservation of the earth. We are proposing 100 names — 50 today and 50 in the next post — for your consideration.    It is a diverse list–with men and women from a broad range of nations,  a variety of religious faiths, and a rainbow of skin colors.

Some of the names are likely to be familiar to you; others may not be.  You can click on each name to learn about that person and what he or she has done to earn our recognition.  Please send us your own nominations for membership in this group of leaders, with links to sites describing their efforts.

Here are our first 50 names; 

  1.  Abdul-Jabbar: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
  2.  Adams: David Adams
  3. Albertini: James Albertini
  4.  Assange: Julian Assange
  5.  Atzmon: Gilad Atzmon
  6.  Avnery: Uri Avnery
  7.  Bacevich: Andrew Bacevich
  8. Baroud: Ramzy Baroud
  9.  Benjamin: Medea Benjamin
  10.  Berrigan: Frida Berrigan
  11.  Binney: William Binney
  12. Blum: Willam Blum
  13. Burrowes: Robert J. Burrowes
  14. Caldicott: Helen Caldicott
  15. Caputi: Ross Caputi 
  16. Castro: Gustavo Castro
  17. Chiponda: Melania Chiponda
  18. Chomsky: Noam Chomsky
  19. Coates: Ta-Nehisi Coates
  20. Cole: Juan Cole
  21. Cook: Michelle Cook
  22. Dalai: Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)
  23. Davis: Angela Davis
  24. De Rosa: Antonio de Rosa
  25. Ebadi: Shirin Ebadi
  26. Eidelson: Roy Eidelson
  27. Ellsberg: Daniel Ellsberg
  28. Engelhardt: Tom Engelhardt
  29. Falk: Richard Falk
  30. Feeley: Tom Feeley
  31. Fonda: Jane Fonda
  32. Galtung: Johan Galtung
  33. Garza: Alicia Garza
  34. Giroux: Henry A. Giroux
  35. Goodman: Amy Goodman
  36. Gorbachev: Mikhail Gorbachev
  37. Greenwald: Glen Greenwald
  38. Guevara-Rosas: Erika Guevara-Rosas
  39. Haugen: Gary Haugen
  40. Hedges: Chris Hedges
  41. Hersh: Seymour Hersh
  42. Hightower: Jim Hightower
  43. Ikeda: Daisaku Ikeda
  44. Jamail: Dahr Jamail
  45. Jones: Van Jones
  46. Kalaygian: Ani Kalayjian
  47. Karman: Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman
  48. Kelly: Kathy Kelly
  49. Killelea: Steve Killelea
  50. Kiriakou: John Kiriakou   

 

Socrates, Buddha, and Thomas Paine

Posted on by kathiemm
An Illustration of the Golden Rule by Norman Rockwell used as the cover of the April 1, 1961 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. In the public domain.

 

by Stefan Schindler

The failure of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to embody their ownmost message of peace partly contributes to the increasing appeal of Buddhism in today’s postmodern war-torn world. Also, there is something absurd – counterproductive, self-defeating, and morally obscene – about the profit motive that is the engine of war. We must put a stop to that engine, before it puts a catastrophic stop to us all.

Transforming swords into plowshares, peace is the fertile soil for the world our children deserve; where schools are gardens of learning and the streets are daily bedecked with festivals, fairs, and creative arts; where cooperation has primacy over competition; where truth and goodness combine to produce beauty for both young and old.

Such is the Buddhist social democratic vision for a peaceable kingdom, offered to the world in what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness.” Practical; peaceful; communal. Guided by Socratic dialogue and debate; where “virtue is pursuit of virtue.” Guided by what Thomas Paine called “common sense” and “the rights of man.”

To recall what Chogyam Trungpa calls “the sanity we were born with,” is to embrace voluntary simplicity, lifelong learning, and compassionate service.

It is to take the heart of the Torah – the Golden Rule – and make it the guiding light of an awakening culture: a culture committed to an ethic of universal brother-sisterhood.

It is to recognize that to be is to interbe. That individual authenticity is a function of learning, self-discovery, creative evolution, and service to community.

The word “Buddha” means “awake.” James Joyce daily prayed that he “awaken from the nightmare of history.” Social democratic Buddhism – also called Engaged Buddhism – shows a path out of Plato’s cave.

Buddha’s “Eightfold Path” includes “right vocation.” Right vocation exhibits right thinking, right speaking, right intention, right action – for all of which, the guiding maxim is: “Do no harm.” Buddhism is therapeutic; and the world is much in need of healing.

Was it merely coincidence that the Spirit of The Sixties combined with the introduction of Buddhism to the West to plant the seeds of peace and love which still remain our best hope for a global civilization rooted in creative evolution?

Echoing the saints and sages of the ages, and their mythic tales of archetypes, Jean Houston forty years ago invited us to embrace the Aquarian challenge of “the possible human.” She invoked William Blake; and she embodied the pioneering spirit of Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, and Teilhard de Chardin.

Today, Richard Oxenberg invokes the spirit of John Lennon when he asks us to imagine “meanings beyond words to speak … where divinity graces humanity … agapic God of a thousand names and no adequate name … where the holy is healing and wholeness.”

Freedom from is freedom for. The enlightenment journey begins with disengagement from society’s Weapons of Mass Dysfunction, resounding through the land in what Howard Zinn called “declarations of independence.”

The enlightenment journey proceeds along what Carlos Castaneda calls “a path with heart.”

The enlightenment journey opens to the realization that the meaning of life is learning and service.

The two wings of Buddhism are wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion are the twin roots of the tree of life of a culture that is civil, civilized, and awake.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Stefan Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts. His books include The Tao of Socrates, America’s Indochina Holocaust, Discoursing with the Gods, and Space is Grace; his forthcoming book is Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

 

Buddhist Social Democracy, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

In Buddha’s worldview, “each life is precious, endowed with freedom and opportunity.” The Buddhist social democratic path to peace offers widespread time and place for deconditioning.

Buddha says the institutions of society ought to serve schools, not the other way around.

Buddha’s politics entail an educational revolution, inspired by Whitehead’s maxim: “Boring teachers should be brought to trial for the murder of young souls.”

The heart of Buddhism is the fusion of wisdom and compassion: the enlightenment adventure, individually and socially. This includes reverence for language, and constant cultivation of the critical thinking skills necessary to combat sophistry in all its nefarious forms.

Buddha understood the perverse impact of sophistry on the welfare of the multitude. Socrates did too, saying at his trial that, actually, Athens was on trial. Socrates today would say King’s quaternity includes a fifth: “Wealth, poverty, racism, war, and sophistry always go together; and we cannot solve one without solving the others.”

As political discourse becomes just another form of the curse of advertising, the more a society sinks to what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of all against all.”

Socrates was condemned to death for his battle against the sophists. In modern America, the brightest lights of two generations – John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John Lennon – were assassinated.

A national pedagogy of Socratic-Buddhist insight – with beneficent influence on the world – could slow contemporary America’s repeat of the self-engendered social implosion of classical Athens’ march of folly.

All the wars in the world are sophistically engendered, sustained by citizens seduced by schools and news-media that ignorate instead of edify.

Buddha’s emphasis on respect for language – and for knowing relevant information – is part of his therapeutic approach to healing the world’s woes. “Right speech” is another spoke on Buddha’s eightfold Dharmachakra.

Buddha’s political vision is heart-centered rationality, where the power of the state and all social institutions promote communal well-being. Communal well-being includes each individual’s freedom for self-discovery and creative evolution. Buddha’s politics are educational, pragmatic, organic. A community is a web of life.

The word Buddha means awake. Buddhist social democracy neither intends nor promotes religious conversion.

Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, daily declares he is a socialist, while saying also that the point is not to become a Buddhist but awake. He urges “a common religion of kindness.”

Buddhist social democracy blends holistic education, egalitarian economics, and a culture-wide primacy of cooperation over competition. Pope Francis – igniting a Renaissance humanism to redeem our spirit – echoes the Dalai Lama’s call to awakening.

If humans are walking question marks – and if philosophy is the journey from the love of wisdom to the wisdom of love – then this is what Buddhism teaches, and what the sangha practices.

Groucho Marx said: “Blessed are the cracked, for they will let in the light.”

Now here’s a Kenneth Patchen poem.

The scene of the crime which is also known as civilized living.

Until the Sun’s Wound is healed in our own hearts.

Love (which includes poetry) is to science

as the free and beautiful catchings of a child are

to the vile and unreturning throes of the hangman.

A feeling of passionate mercy. The rest doesn’t matter a damn!

                                                                                           Hallelujah Anyway