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Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc.

by Bhikkhu Bodhi

Facing the Future

Four Essays

Bhikkhu Bodhi

Four Essays on the Social Relevance of Buddhism

Buddhist Publication Society

Kandy • Sri Lanka

Published in 2000

Buddhist Publication Society

PO. Box 61

54, Sangharaja Mawatha

Kandy, Sri Lanka

National Library of Sri Lanka —

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Bodhi, Bhikkhu

Facing the Future: four essays on Buddhism and

Society /Bhikkhu Bodhi — Kandy : Buddhist

Publication Society, 2000

ISBN 955-24-0215-8

i. 294.337 DDC 21 ii. Title iii. Series

1. Buddhism — Social aspects

The Wheel Publication No. 438/440

A full list of our publications will be sent upon request.

Write to: The Hon. Secretary Buddhist Publication Society

P.O. Box 61 54, Sangharaja Mawatha

Kandy Sri Lanka

E-mail: bps@ids.lk

Website: http://www.lanka.com/dhamma

Introduction

In this collection of essays, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi uses the

Buddha’s teaching as a lens through which to examine

some of the confusions about social values that have en-

gulfed us at the dawn of the new century.

The opening essay, “A Buddhist Social Ethic for

the New Century,” sets the pace by drawing a contrast

between the social system fostered by global capitalism

and the type of social organization that might follow

from a practical application of Buddhist principles.

“A Buddhist Model for Economic and Social Development”

continues the argument by highlighting the economic,

social, and ecological costs of industrial-growth society,

sketching a more “people-friendly” alternative based

on Buddhist values. “The Changing Face of Buddhism”

opens with the question why, in traditional Buddhist

countries, Buddhism today is losing its appeal to

the young, on its way to becoming little more than a

fossilized expression of ethnic culture; in attempting

to answer this question be proposes some new lines

of emphasis that might help to reverse this trend. In

“Sangha at the Crossroads” he explores the problems

that young monks face in nding a meaningful role in

today’s rapidly changing world.

Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................ iv

A Buddhist Social Ethic for the New Century .................. 6

A Buddhist Approach to Economic

and Social Development ............................................................ 36

Is It Feasible for All? ......................................................................... 39

Is It Desirable at All? ........................................................................ 41

Buddhist Guideposts towards Development ............ 46

The Changing Face of Buddhism ................................................. 58

Sangha at the Crossroads ...................................................................... 73

A Buddhist Social Ethic for

the New Century

Originally given as the Centenary Lecture of the

Young Men’s Buddhist Association, Colombo, 8 January 1998.

The arrival of a new century is always a time of great fer-

ment and great expectations, and when the new century

also marks the dawn of a new millennium our expec-

tations are likely to be especially intense. An inherent

optimism makes us think that the new is always bound to

be better than the old, that the arrival of the next year or

century will inevitably bring our wildest dreams to full-

ment. Unfortunately, however, life is not so simple that the

mere ticking of the clock and a change of calendars are

enough to undo the knots with which we have tied our-

selves up by our rash decisions and ill-considered actions

through all the preceding months, years, and decades.

One fact that past experience should deeply impress

on us is the need to look carefully beneath the surface of

events for hidden tendencies that portend future harm.

The importance of this guideline is brought home for us

by reection on the transition from the nineteenth to the

twentieth century. In the Western world the end of the

nineteenth century was a period of fervent optimism, of

utopian dreams quickened by an uninching faith in a

gloried ideal called progress. The twin leaders of the cult

of progress were science and technology. Science was the

new Prometheus, an unstoppable Prometheus that had

snatched nature’s hidden secrets and passed them on to

a humanity brimming over with ardent hopes. In each

decade, one major breakthrough in knowledge followed

another, each fresh theoretical advance being matched

by corresponding success in harnessing nature’s powers

to our needs. The result was a tremendous surge in the

growth of technology that promised to liberate human-

kind from its most stubborn historical limitations.

The next century showed just how short-sighted this

optimism really was. Indeed, for those who looked deeply

enough, the seeds of destruction were already visible right

beneath the feet of the proud conquistadors. They could be

seen on the home front, in the miserable lives of millions

of workers condemned to degrading toil in the factories,

mines, and sweatshops; in the ruthless colonization of the

non-Western world, the rape of its resources and subjuga-

tion of its peoples; in the mounting friction and tensions

between ambitious empires competing for global domi-

nation. During the rst half of the twentieth century the

tensions exploded twice, in two world wars with a death

count of many millions. These wars, and the ensuing cold

war, brought into the open the dark primordial forces that

had long been simmering just a little beneath the polished

veneer of Western civilization. It is surely signicant that

our discovery of nature’s most arcane secret — the con-

vertibility of matter and energy — conferred on us the

capacity for total self-annihilation: unlimited power and

total destruction arriving in the same package.

Today, as we stand at the beginning of the twenty-

rst century, our world has become a living paradox. It is

a world of immense wealth, but also of grinding poverty

where 1.3 billion people — a quarter of the world’s popula-

tion — live in constant want. A world of tremendous ad-

vances in medicine and health care, where eleven million

people die annually from diseases that are easily treatable.

A world where the daily trade in lethal weapons numbers

in the millions of dollars, yet where seven million chil-

dren die of hunger each year and 800 million people are

severely undernourished. And perhaps most alarming

of all, a world bent on unlimited economic growth on a

planet whose nite resources are rapidly dwindling. Thus,

with all our bold strides towards the future, our world still

suffers from painful wounds, and the need for a solution,

for a cure, has become ever more insistent if humanity is

to survive intact through to the end of the new century.

In the course of this paper I wish to formulate a Thera-

vada Buddhist response to the need to heal the wounds

of the world. In popular textbooks on world religions,

Theravada Buddhism is generally depicted as a religion of

individual salvation which holds up as its ideal a purely

private enlightenment to be reached through renunciation

and meditation. Though Theravada Buddhism does stress

the inescapably personal nature of the ultimate goal, if we

carefully examine the suttas or discourses of the Buddha,

we would see that the Buddha was keenly aware of the

problems human beings face in the social dimensions

of their lives, and he formulated his teaching to address

these problems just as much as to show the way to nal

liberation. Although these texts are nowhere as numer-

ous as those dealing with personal ethics, meditation, and

philosophical insight, they remain remarkable testimoni-

als to the clear sociological acumen of the Awakened One.

Even today they still offer clear-cut practical guidelines in

devising a social ethic capable of addressing the problems

peculiar to the present age.

The rst principle that the Buddha’s teaching gives

us in responding to these problems is a methodological

one: not to rush to foregone conclusions but to investigate

the underlying causes at all levels, and not to stop until we

have reached the deepest roots. The common tendency to-

day, however, in tackling social problems is quite different.

Particularly in political and economic circles, obstinate

human dilemmas with subterranean roots are treated sim-

ply as technical snags that can be resolved merely by the

application of the right technical solution. Thus, it is held,

to counter the danger of global warming we must hammer

out a treaty on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases; if

crime and violence are on the increase, we need a larger

and tougher police force; if drug addiction has reached

alarming proportions among our youth, we need more

effective controls against drug trafcking. Such measures

may indeed be expedient safeguards against the grosser

manifestations of the problems they are intended to rec-

tify, but however effective and efcient they may be in

the short run, on their own they do not provide long-term

solutions. What they offer is cosmetic treatment, stopgap

measures that should not be taken as substitutes for alter-

natives that operate at the level of the deeper root-causes.

When we adopt a Buddhist perspective on the

wounds that afict our world today, we soon realize that

these wounds are symptomatic: a warning signal that

something is fundamentally awry with the way we lead

our lives. We would see these outer wounds as outgrowths

of a more malignant wound hidden deep within, eating

away at our vital strength and discharging its venom into

our air, rivers, and oceans; into our forests and farmlands;

into our family lives and homes; into our social relation-

ships and political agendas. Thus, from the Buddhist point

of view, what we really need to heal our common wounds

is radical surgery, a far-reaching change in our collective

views, attitudes, and lifestyles. The word that enjoys cur-

rency these days as an expression for our need is “values.”

We are told that the reason social conditions have degen-

erated so widely is because people have abandoned tradi-

tional values, and all we need to solve our problems is a

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eBUDDHANET'SBOOKLIBRARYE-mail:bdea@buddhanet.netWebsite:www.buddhanet.netBuddhaDharmaEducationAssociationInc.byBhikkhuBodhiFacingtheFutureFacingtheFutureFourEssaysbyBhikkhuBodhiFourEssaysontheSocialRelevanceofBuddhismBuddhistPublicationSocietyKandy•SriLankaPublishedin2000BuddhistPublicationSocietyPO...

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