Nourishing Bodhisattva Practice

what to do with your goat in a drowning world

hear the helicopters come over the roof
water's up to my attic windows
and I'm stuck here with my goat
I can see my neighbor in the hole on his roof
he's got two dachsies and a tomcat
just across the rushing river is his sister
she's cradling her baby and a rooster
circling helicopters circling helicopters
will take me but not my goat
will lift me up from muck and flood
but they won't take my neighbor's dogs or cat
or his sister's baby's rooster
helicopters overhead nation to the rescue
take the people damn their friends
I'm not going without my goat
he's not going without his pets
baby won't leave without her rooster
lord oh lord why don't we have an ark
that's the helicopters leaving
that's the nation to the rescue
leaving us here in the dark
             - Andrei Codrescu

Buddhists are called by compassion to alleviate suffering in the world. While there are innumerable forms this practice can take, two that I have explored are social justice and environmentalism. But anyone who has dared to turn toward these issues can easily feel overwhelmed, like the tide is literally and figuratively rising around them, and, as a way of feeling better, slip back into denial.

For me, these issues sometimes seem utterly overwhelming and intractable, especially in the face of a White House that is so regressive. Though I may put solar panels on my house, if the Trump administration simultaneously denies the reality of global warming, pulls out of international climate agreements, and boosts coal and oil production, I can feel defeated. And as a teacher, though I may help a Latin American or Black student advance into a higher level English class, if more aggressive border patrols separate migrant families from one another and children die in record numbers while in detention, I begin to feel hopeless.

In the face of such overwhelming odds, it is tempting to turn away from these issues to avoid feeling so disheartened. We may thus swing like pendulums from feeling motivated and taking actions to feeling overwhelmed and disengaging. In moments of overwhelm, we may tell ourselves, "it's all just too much. There's actually nothing we can do to prevent institutional racism and the destruction of our planet. It's inevitable." We may even pretend that our "Buddha-nature" liberates us from caring. But this is a misunderstanding of our Buddha-nature.

As I have described, if our insight into emptiness is genuine, our compassion naturally increases. We are all interwoven. We are all part of the same systems. We breathe the same air. In awakening to the inherent interconnectedness and beauty of the world, we can't help but be moved when we see what we love being harmed. Though sometimes it offers temporary relief from this world on fire, escapism is ultimately no refuge from what actually is. If our practice is authentic, withdrawal will, in time, give way to a more honest sense of co-responsibility every time we hear about the disproportionate imprisonment and poverty you of people of color, about historic storms flooding our cities, or about the eventual potential destruction of civilization due to global warming. This sense of co-responsibility is not a flaw in practice. It is our compassion urging us to save all beings.

But how can Buddhists stay engaged with social and environmental causes in a sustainable and effective way given how intractable the issues appear? I decided to write this post for myself as encouragement in the face of tough odds. I hope that some of my advice to myself will be of some use to you.

First, for me, Facebook is not nearly enough to nourish or carry out activism. Social media stirs us into a frenzy with its extreme headlines, but the most common outcome is that I react to a few posts, maybe write one myself, and then slip back into feeling overwhelmed.

In terms of inspiring effective and persistent activism, we might begin by spending more time appreciating what we actually love. We are, for example, more inspired to protect nature when we remind ourselves of how much we cherish being in it. I'm lucky. My father took me on a tour of many of our nation's parks when I was young and brought us mountain climbing every year. I vividly recall him standing on top of mountains looking over valleys of fall foliage with tears in his eyes. My love of nature was implanted early. But in our high-tech, busy society, it is easy to lose touch with nature and our love of its beauty. We need to nourish this love. Take walks in a park among the trees. Sit on a bench and listen to the birds sing and the wind in the leaves. Watch chipmunks scurry through the ivy and chirp at one another. Listen to children play in a green field. Remember that this is their world too. By being attentive in a meditative way in the real world, by "practicing" being awake to what surrounds us, we find our inspiration to save all beings. And we can cultivate this appreciative attention on the cushion practicing zazen. There’s nothing that sustains me more than this.

Another way to nourish ourselves is to join with others doing the same work. In a culture where things may be going in a direction with which we do not agree, we can feel like whatever we do is, as one friend put it, "a squirt gun in an inferno." And we can feel quite alone, without a clue what to do. But when we join with others, we get ideas and energy from one another. Each of us can carry part of the load. This gives us hope. Thousands of buckets of water just might make a difference.

Morning Star Zen Sangha, my practice group, is initiating "Bodhisattva Practice Group” to choose a few local actions to do together. It is easier to live according to our vow to save all beings when we are supported by others with similar values. There are so many organizations and people doing excellent work. We can carry out local projects with them like challenging school boards to address the achievement gap, picking up trash off the beach, or gathering signatures for more renewable energy. Perhaps most inspiringly, when we join with others, our efforts add up. Many drops become a wave.

If our sanghas align in practice but less in activism, joining other organizations can help. Groups that advocate politically offers us a personal hope that we can sway public policies in an altruistic direction. Eli Broad offers democratic engagement as the most effective and empowering means of joining with others to transform a society. He writes in the New York Times, "When a society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality.  Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how.  Those who receive help are not only objects of the transaction, but also subjects of it -- citizens with agency.  When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality:  the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient." While democratic institutions may not always deliver on our hopes, actively participating on the local, state, and national level offers the real opportunity for our society to live up to our ideals. And when we do so with coalitions, our voices multiply and reverberate.

Another thing I have been reflecting on is how our mindfulness can help us attend to issues one moment at a time. For example, we might notice the way we casually buy, use, and "recycle" plastic. But most plastic that we drop in the recycle bin is not actually recycled, and huge amounts of it end up in the oceans, dissolving and entering our food chain. (Turns out things actually are interconnected!) When we see how much we waste and the harm it causes, we can attentively curb our waste. These commitments, when shared among friends, begin to feel meaningful, like maybe we can turn the tide.

Finally, I need to remind myself to notice successes, not just failures. Even though there are many people who may buy styrofoam cups, if I don't buy one, there is one less cup for a whale to swallow. As a child, my daughter used to take the rings that held six-packs of cans together and cut them so they would not strangle sea turtles and birds. We can all become children again, taking great care of what we naturally love and feeling good about the small things we are doing. After all, each being we save is a universe unto itself!

So spend time appreciating what you love, join with others to take action, and celebrate the successes along the way. Most fundamentally, we need each other if we hope to save all beings. If we are left alone on the roof of a house and the flood waters rise, we will not be able to save ourselves, never mind those we love. But if we can build bridges to one another, we can save all beings, one being at a time.

Bodhisattva Practice: the Natural Result of Insight into Emptiness

There is a common misunderstanding that insight into emptiness and enlightenment liberate a person from concern about the state of the world.

One Zen teacher recently posted on a Buddhist Facebook page that a report by over a hundred scientists recently indicated that we have entered an era of mass extinctions largely due to climate change. The post encouraged taking care of the planet the way we care for our zendos. Responses were largely positive, but a few people responded that we should not worry but should just sit and become enlightened; everything is impermanent, so essentially, who cares? In other places, I have seen people make the case that since all things are empty of selfhood, there are no beings who suffer, so there is no cause for us to be concerned about beings who are suffering. Another take is that "I just cultivate my own inner peace, and other people need to cultivate theirs. Their suffering is just in their minds (and not in mine)." So there is this idea out there that insight into emptiness liberates a person from caring about people's suffering. This view can lead people to dismiss the suffering caused by climate change, racism, and poverty as fabrications of the imagination. It also elevates a separate sense of self (me versus those who suffer) that is actually born out of privilege. This is not my understanding of emptiness, nor is it my understanding of Buddhism.

The Dalai Lama writes in his wonderful book, Practicing Wisdom, that insight into emptiness deepens one's compassion and that if it does not, then one's "insight" is both misguided and worthless. He writes, "If as an individual meditator you have a sense that your realization of emptiness is deepening yet there is no corresponding increase in your compassion toward others, then this is perhaps an indication that your understanding of emptiness is not really profound or genuine.... If your understanding of emptiness does not contribute positively in any way toward [the development of compassion], there is no worth in it at all.... We should not have the notion that buddhahood is a state of total apathy, devoid of feeling, emotion, and empathy toward other sentient beings. Meditation on emptiness is not some kind of escapism, refusing to deal with the diversity and complexity of the conventional and relative world. The aim is to be able to relate with the phenomenal world in a correct and meaningful way" (27).

The Heart Sutra discusses emptiness at some length. In it, Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (a bodhisattva is one who vows to awaken and save all beings from suffering), explains to Shariputra that "emptiness is exactly form," and insight into this fact transforms "all suffering and distress." The sutra goes on to say that there is "no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind..., no suffering [and no] cause of suffering." Those who study Buddhism can be easily confused by these statements and come to believe that Avalokiteshvara means that nothing exists. If taken literally, this is a pretty nihilistic sentiment for a bodhisattva of compassion.

How we understand "no" in the Heart Sutra is important. Avalokiteshvara is pointing to the living truth. When we conceptualize reality, we tend to put things in separate categories that often do not reflect how interwoven and fluid things really are. For example, we might think that we see with the eye alone, that seeing is just a function of the eye, but this is not true. Seeing actually is a "dependent arising" that includes the eye, the mind that processes images, light reflecting off objects, and the objects themselves. If we remove any part of the entirety of seeing, we no longer have any vision. Therefore, we can say that there is no vision, no "eye," without the entirety of creation, just as there is no separate "I" that exists independently from the rest of the world. Our physical bodies are made of the rain, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. Logically, it makes sense that we would therefore care for the environment. Even our minds, which we often think of as entirely independent, are constituted of things that are not the mind -- fleeting thoughts, perceptions of sensory objects, etc. Things, including ourselves, do not exist as stand-alone, permanent entities. Reality is "empty" of unchanging, independent essences. This is not the same as saying things do not exist or that we cannot provisionally distinguish one thing from another. Rather, things exist as dependent arisings.

Insight into emptiness means that we come to see the way things actually exist. When we do, we realize that everything exists in dependence on other factors, and that there are no abiding, separate selves anywhere. To realize emptiness is not just an intellectual process, though we can use our intelligence to inspire practice and point the way. But in meditation, we can realize this interwovenness in a way that is non-conceptual. It is in meditation that we come to a nondual realization of emptiness in which emptiness is exactly form, sometimes described as "suchness." In this realization, there is neither negation nor affirmation. There is neither emptiness nor form. We start to feel some deep sense of intimacy with the world that exists beyond conceptions and with the flow of thought itself, which also has no fixed essence. We have to meditate, to actually look, to realize the way things actually exist.

When we awaken, the result is not apathy or a nihilistic understanding based on notions of emptiness, impermanence, or non-existence. Awakening involves a remarkable appreciation of the aliveness of each moment and the deeply interpenetrating nature of reality itself. When we hear the song of a bird, it floats through our own hearts. We are not separate from the bird's song. Sometimes this recognition is called "no self," but it does not mean there is nothing. This intimacy and fluidity is so moving, we call it awakening. As Torei Enji wrote, "Everything reveals the mysterious truth of the Tathagata. Things can’t help but shine with this light."

But here's the key: awakening is not limited to beautiful experiences. When we see suffering in the world, and when we feel the way all beings reside in our hearts, this suffering touches our own being. To realize emptiness is not some aloof state of negation; it is actually quite a vulnerable enterprise. 

This appreciation of how interwoven we are -- or of dependent arising -- is the root of compassion. Being interconnected, we are touched by the suffering in the world. Since suffering lacks fixed essence but arises out of specific causes and conditions, we need not identify with it or get caught up in reified conceptions of it, and this is liberating. This is one way insight into emptiness alleviates suffering. But there is still pain in the world and pain that touches our hearts. And since pain is not a fixed essence, pain can also be alleviated if we are able to remove its causes. Of course not all causes of suffering can be removed, but many can. So insight into the emptiness of phenomena often brings with it a sense of possibility and motivates us to take compassionate action to alleviate suffering whenever we can.

There are many beings who are suffering in this world. In paying attention and not turning away, we will see that climate change has already led to refugee crises and may cause the mass extinction of species. In America, there is great suffering caused by white supremacy, including historic and ongoing systemic racism, the disproportionate use of force by police, and the often unacknowledged biases and blindnesses we perpetuate within our own heart-minds. The notion that we should not care about these and other problems because we are somehow "enlightened" is contrary to the lived experience of realization. This is why Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion who offers the teachings of the Heart Sutra, is depicted as having tears running down her face and a thousand arms and hands with which to save the many beings of the world.

We personally don’t have a thousand hands. And we can’t work 24-7. The point isn’t to burn out. But we can see what speaks to our hearts, and do something.

The term "emptiness" as used in the Heart Sutra does not mean that nothing matters. Nor does it mean that there is some separate metaphysical entity outside phenomena in which we take refuge. On the contrary, it suggests that we are so interwoven that we care for all beings as ourselves, and there is the real possibility of alleviating suffering. It is this compassion that led the enlightened one, Buddha, to rise from under the Bodhi tree, return to his sangha, and teach them. "Bodhisattva practice," or activism inspired by the compassionate witnessing of suffering in the world, is a natural result of our deepening insight into emptiness. We can't do everything, but compassion inspires us to do what we can.