The worldliness of Buddhism. (ancient religion)
Donald K. Swearer
The Wilson Quarterly
Vol.21 No.2 (Spring 199)
pp.81-93
COPYRIGHT 1997 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Despite Buddhism's growing presence in the West, most Americans
still badly misunderstand this ancient world religion. The leaders
of Philadelphia's Thai community were rudely reminded of this
unpleasant fact during the 1980s when they set out to buy land for a
Buddhist temple and monastery not far from the City of Brotherly
Love. After searching nearly a year, the Thais were delighted to
find a lovely 10-acre site overlooking a lake in southeastern
Pennsylvania's Chester County. All that was needed was the local
zoning board's permission to use the site for religious purposes.
Arriving on the appointed day for their hearing before the board,
the group's leaders were surprised to find an angry,
standing-room-only crowd packing the room. One after another during
the long evening, impassioned residents rose to vent their fears
about the Buddhists' plans. A Buddhist presence would destroy the
community's Christian and American values, some speakers said.
Others worried that proselytizing Buddhists would brainwash their
sons and daughters and lure them into esoteric religious practices.
Buddhism to these Americans was barely distinguishable from the Hare
Krishnas and other cults, an exotic threat to their world. The
dismayed Thais immediately withdrew their application. No one had
asked them about their intentions or aspirations. Nor did it seem
likely that anyone would.
Unfortunately, the opponents of the Buddhist temple in Chester
County were no worse informed about the nature of Buddhism than most
other Americans. To be sure, the view of Buddhism as a mystical
religion far removed from the realities of the workaday world has
been a major part of the faith's appeal in the West. Yet whether
this picture of Buddhism-as-esoteric-religion is seen in a negative
or positive light, it is still a flawed and one-dimensional
portrait. It is a portrait, however, with a long history. Some of
the earliest Western explicators of Buddhism, such as W. Y.
Evans-Wentz in Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrine (1935) and Alexandra
David-Neel in Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929), painted Tibetan
Buddhism in shades of the exotic and esoteric. During the 1950s, D.
T. Suzuki's depiction of Zen Buddhism as antirational and
iconoclastic had great appeal to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac
(author of The Dharma Bums [1958]), and other members of the Beat
Generation. The appeal spilled over into the counterculture
movement, which made books such as Alan Watt's Way of Zen (1957) and
Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (1922; translation 1951) part of the
young's standard equipment. Today, Buddhism is probably personified
for most people by the Dalai Lama and celebrity followers such as
actor Richard Gere. (That is only the beginning: the Dalai Lama is
featured in two upcoming Hollywood movies.)
The view of Buddhism held by many Westerners is one-sided, but not
totally without foundation. From its very beginning some 2,500 years
ago, there has been within Buddhism a tension between the
this-worldly and the other-worldly. This tension was at the heart of
many early doctrinal controversies about such matters as the nature
of Nirvana, the purpose of monastic life, and the character of the
relationship between monks and the laity. Its origins go back to the
life of the founder, Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, or the
Enlightened One.
Buddhism emerged in what is now southern Nepal during the sixth
century B.C.E. The traditional dates of the Buddha's life are
563-483 B.C.E., although some modern scholars place his lifetime
more than 100 years later. It was a time of unusual upheaval and
change throughout the world, as the widespread adoption of iron
tools and weapons revolutionized farming and warfare. During the
Buddha's lifetime, the vast plains of northern India nourished by
the Ganges River and its tributaries were being remade. The region's
thick forests were disappearing as an expanding population claimed
more and more land for paddy rice and other cultivated crops. New
towns and cities sprang up, and with them came a radically new
political order as powerful rulers absorbed the region's many small,
autonomous states into larger kingdoms and empires. The Buddha
himself lived to see the land of his clan, the Sakyas, overrun by
another kingdom, which itself later fell to an even larger empire.
Elsewhere in the ancient world, similar changes were bringing
forth other thinkers and prophets, from Confucius and Lao-tse in
China to Thales, Heraclitus, and other pre-Socratics in Greece. In
India, the Buddha and other mendicant truth seekers including
Makkhali Gosala and Mahavira, the respective founders of the
Ajavikas and the Jains - attracted small groups of disciples who
followed an informal code of religious discipline and shared many of
the same religious concepts. They set themselves against the
dominant Brahmanism, which elevated a priestly caste to prominence.
The charismatic challengers, although not revered as divine, were
honored both for their teachings and for magical feats achieved
through the disciplines of yoga, meditation, and asceticism.
Solid facts about the Buddha's life are scarce. The earliest sacred
biographies, such as the Buddhacarita (The acts of the Buddha),
written in the second century B.C.E., are mostly myth and legend.
Buddhism's many different traditions have different versions of the
Buddha story, and there even are variations within each tradition.
In the version accepted by Theravada Buddhists, who are
predominant in Southeast Asia, the Buddha was born Prince Siddhartha
Gautama, the son of the ruler of the Sakya clan in the foothills of
the Himalayas. Shortly after his birth, eight learned fortunetellers
predicted that Siddhartha would become either a universal,
world-conquering monarch or a fully enlightened Buddha. Distressed
at the prospect that his son might not succeed him, Siddhartha's
father surrounded him with material pleasures and possessions. At
the age of 16 the prince married, and his father built him three
splendid palaces, one for each season, where he was attended by
servants and concubines and no less than 40,000 dancing girls.
During the next 17 years, according to legendary accounts,
Siddhartha was "wholly given over to pleasure."
The story takes a dramatic turn when the prince encounters a
decrepit old man, a grievously ill man, a corpse, and finally an
ascetic. These experiences threw Siddhartha into despair. His
palace, "as splendid as the palace of the chief of the gods, began
to seem like a charnal ground filled with dead bodies and the three
modes of existence [past, present, future] like houses of fire." He
vowed to live the life of a wandering ascetic in a quest for an
eternal truth beyond the transient truths of ordinary sense
perception and beyond the inexorable realities of aging, sickness,
and death. For six years he wandered northern India with five
disciples (one of whom was one of the original eight
fortunetellers). To no avail, he studied the teachings of the great
philosophers and masters of yoga and practiced extreme forms of
renunciation and asceticism, at times living on a single grain of
rice per day, at others going completely without food. These years,
says one Buddhist text, "were like time spent in endeavoring to tie
the air into knots." Finally, after he collapsed during a long fast
and was given up for dead by his followers, the Buddha abandoned
this path.
After he regained his health, the Buddha seated himself beneath a
tree and resolved not to rise until he had found enlightenment. To
achieve it he was forced to confront Mara, the lord of the senses,
who is strongly associated with death. Again, accounts of this epoch
battle between good and evil vary, but in the end Siddhartha defeats
the hosts his foe sends against him, calling on the power of Mother
Earth to defend himself. He spends the rest of the night in deep
meditation, finally attaining insight into the nature of suffering,
its cause and its cessation - a state of understanding and
equanimity called Nirvana. The tradition dates this event to 528
B.C.E., and the Buddha's first words uttered after his enlightenment
have been passed down in poetry and legend:
Long have I wandered; Long bound by the chain of life. Through many
births I have sought in vain The builder of this house [mind and
body]. Suffering is birth again and again. O housemaker [craving], I
now see you! You shall not build this house again. Broken are all
your rafters, Your roof beam destroyed. My mind has attained the
unconditioned, And reached the end of all craving.
The Buddha's victory represents the core teaching of early Buddhism:
suffering and death can be overcome only when ignorance and desire
have been put aside. This message was encapsulated in the Buddha's
first post-enlightenment teaching, Setting the Wheel of the Truth in
Motion. This discourse, delivered to his five disciples at what is
now the Deer Park in the holy city of Benares, enumerated the Four
Noble Truths: that life's pleasures and satisfactions are ultimately
unsatisfactory or unfulfilling, that this sense of dissatisfaction
is rooted in selfish attachment and greed based on an erroneous
perception of ego; that a deeper sense of purpose and meaning
(Nirvana) is achieved when the false sense of ego is transcended,
and that the way to this saving knowledge is by means of the Noble
Eightfold Path. The Path's eight elements are right understanding,
right intention, right speech, right conduct, right vocation, right
effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Before the five followers would accept his teaching, however, the
Buddha had to persuade them that in casting off his life as an
ascetic he had not merely embraced its opposite, a life of pleasure.
The path to enlightenment, he told them, required following a Middle
Way, avoiding the extremes of self-mortification and
self-indulgence. The Middle Way is a life of simplicity, not
discomfort. When the skeptical disciples finally accepted the
Buddha's teaching they became the first members of the sangha, or
religious order. They, too, eventually became, like the Buddha
himself, arhat (perfected ones), though their enlightenment was not
the equal of the full and perfect enlightenment of the Buddha.
Soon the sangha had 60 members, all of whom traveled to spread the
Buddha's teaching within an area of perhaps 200 square miles in
northern India, and all of whom became arhat. Their leader himself
spent 45 years as a mendicant teacher. According to Buddhist
accounts, he attracted followers from many social classes and walks
of life, including merchants, aristocrats, and even ascetics such as
the great yogi Kasyapa, whom the Buddha converted through feats of
levitation and clairvoyance. After some debate, the Buddha
reluctantly allowed women to undertake the monastic life.
Mahaprajapati, who was the Buddha's aunt as well as his stepmother,
became the first Buddhist nun.
The Western scholars and travelers who took up the study of Buddhism
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were enthralled by this
story of the Buddha's renunciation and enlightenment. In their
writings they implicitly contrasted Buddhism with the faith-based
theism of Christianity, portraying it as a rational religious
philosophy pursued through a quiet life of renunciation and
meditation. A few of these early observers emphasized the more
mystical and esoteric aspects of Buddhism, but they shared with
other Westerners a focus on what the famed German sociologist Max
Weber called religious "virtuosos" - the Buddhist monks who
performed heroic feats of fasting and meditation in pursuit of
absolute truth.
It is largely because of these earlier writers, especially Weber,
that the West has acquired a skewed portrait of Buddhism as a
world-denying religion. Idealizing the sangha as a company of
renouncers, they tended to dismiss the everyday devotional Buddhism
of the faith's many ordinary adherents - including such things as
their veneration of the sangha and of Buddha images and relics - as
a corrupt form of Buddhism that arose as illiterate peasants
throughout Asia embraced the faith after the Buddha's death. In
these writers' hands, Buddhism was made to appear a faith virtually
without historical, sociological, and political dimensions.
But the "worldliness" of Buddhism may be said to have begun with
the Buddha himself. He was, after all, a man of considerable
charisma who worked ceaselessly after his enlightenment to show
others the way to the truth. Among his most important early
supporters were local kings and nobles in northern India, men who
had been moved by his words and deeds, such as King Bimbisara, the
ruler of the kingdom of Magadha.
The Buddha himself is said to have warned his followers on more than
one occasion against worshiping him. In the Samyutta-Nitkaya, he
sends away an overly attentive disciple named Vatkali, saying "What
good to you is this body of filth? He who sees the dharma
[teachings] sees me." Yet in his own lifetime the Buddha received
generous offerings from devoted lay followers, and veneration of his
bodily relics may have begun immediately after his death (apparently
from dysentery) and cremation in 483 B.C.E. According to Buddhist
sources, the Buddha's cremated remains were divided among eight
Indian rulers, who enshrined them in reliquary mounds (stupas) in
their kingdoms. Legend also recounts that King Asoka, who ruled
Magadha from about 273 to 232 B.C.E. and eventually extended his
dominion - and the influence of Buddhism - over much of the Indian
subcontinent, re-enshrined these relics at 84,000 locations
throughout India. As Buddhism later spread throughout Asia, ever
more elaborate and beautiful stupas were built.
The cult of stupas was one of the earliest forms of Buddhist
devotional religion. The stupa not only symbolized the Buddha but in
a magical sense made him present. Freestanding images of the Buddha
that began to appear as early as the first century B.C.E. served a
similar purpose. In his own lifetime, the Blessed One and the sangha
received offerings from their lay followers, who came not only to
hear religious teachings but hoping to gain some boon or benefit -
if not in this life then in some future one. After his death,
pilgrims traveled to the stupas in order to be in his presence,
bringing offerings of incense, flowers, and material goods. Monks,
who were originally respected chiefly as teachers of the Buddha's
dharma, came to be revered as representatives of his sacred wisdom
and repositories of his power. They, too, were showered with
offerings by hopeful laypeople.
Ordinary religious practice developed along different lines in
different countries, but it generally combines a concern with
otherworldly affairs with a very ordinary interest in such things as
good health and good crops. The faithful may worship at home before
their own shrines and at weekly temple rituals. Throughout the
Buddhist world, ceremonies and festivals mark major events such as
the lunar New Year, Buddha's Day, and changes in the agricultural
cycle. Some holidays are unique to certain locales or specially
attuned to local tastes. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhists
honor their ancestors during All Souls feasts. In Tibet, the new
year festival includes a ritual exorcism of evil; in Chiang Mai, in
northern Thailand, an image of the Buddha is paraded through the
streets in hopes of ensuring the onset of the monsoon rains. A day
at a temple fair with the raucous noise of hawkers and entertainers
would convince most outsiders that Buddhism is not all about
withdrawal and meditation.
These rituals, ceremonies, and festivals elevate life from the
mundane and give meaning to the seemingly random nature of human
experience by connecting it to a Buddhist narrative framework.
Buddhism also helps to define social ethics for laypeople, upholding
the virtues of generosity and loving kindness toward humans and
animals and placing a high value on honesty and uprightness. All
Buddhists are expected to embrace the Five Precepts - which forbid
killing, stealing, lying, adultery, and the consumption of alcohol.
From the renunciant elements of Buddhist practice comes an emphasis
on the values of simplicity, equanimity, and non-violence. These
values are not confined to the monastery. Lose your temper in a
20th-century Chiang Mai market, and ordinary Thais will soothe you
with the words jai-yen (literally, have a cool head).
While Buddhists have evolved various conceptions of salvation, early
Buddhism did not look for release in an eternal hereafter. The
Buddhist conception of existence is cyclical, with escape from the
pain of worldly existence possible only for those who attain Nirvana
after many lifetimes of effort. In Buddhism there is rebirth but no
reincarnation. The Buddha taught that the idea of a self or soul is
an illusion (a teaching that has caused endless debate among his
followers). What is reborn is a consciousness conditioned by the sum
of all past actions, or karma.
Buddhism's concern with earthly affairs began, in a sense, at the
top. As it spread through Asia during the centuries after the
Buddha's death, it owed much of its success to the support of
powerful kings, many of whom were attracted to Buddhism because it
provided a cosmological scheme legitimating a powerful, centralized
rule, a scheme rooted in a cyclical view of history. In the golden
age, a universal monarch presided over a realm free from poverty,
violence, and wrongdoing. But in a world marked by strife,
hostility, and greed, kings must maintain order in the secular
realm, by force if necessary, while the sangha presides over
spiritual life and guides monarchs to further the welfare of their
subjects.
Probably not by accident, many of the important legends concerning
kingship date from about the time of Buddhism's most famous royal
patron, King Asoka. In about 264 B.C.E. Asoka conquered Kalinga, the
most powerful kingdom in India still independent of his rule, but
was so appalled by the horrors his armies had inflicted on the
Kalingans that he embraced the Buddha's teaching of nonviolence and
compassion. Asoka became convinced that the only true conquest was
not by force of arms but by the force of the teachings of religion.
If his heirs should also become conquerors, he wrote, "they should
take pleasure in patience and gentleness, and regard as (the only
true) conquest the conquest won by piety."
Asoka himself may not have been a practicing Buddhist, but there is
no doubt that he was an active supporter of the faith. He generously
subsidized the monastic order and did much to aid the spread of
Buddhism. He was, by all accounts, a wise and humane ruler, and
tolerant of other faiths (as were many later Buddhist rulers). On
rocks and stone pillars he erected throughout the lands under his
control - a number of them still standing - he engraved edicts
extolling virtuous behavior, commending specific Buddhist texts, and
encouraging his subjects to make the pilgrimage to Bodh-Gaya, the
Buddha's birthplace.
A religion that lives by royal patronage can also die without it.
Little more than 50 years after King Asoka's death in 232 B.C.E.,
when his empire passed into the hands of Hindu successors, Buddhism
began to wane in the land of its birth. It would revive under royal
patronage, but after the 10th century C.E. its last lights in India
would flicker out under the combined assaults of a resurgent
Hinduism and invasions by the followers of Muhammad.
Throughout Asia, the relationship between state and sangha would be
vitally important to Buddhism's condition. In north China, Buddhism
flourished until the Northern Wei emperor decreed in 446 C.E. that
all Buddhist temples and stupas were to be destroyed. The religion
was later revived but fell again after 846 when a T'ang imperial
edict led to the destruction of some 4,600 monasteries and 40,000
temples and forced more than 260,000 monks and nuns to return to lay
life. Buddhism by then was too thoroughly integrated into Chinese
life to disappear, but it would never regain the vibrancy it had
once enjoyed. Today, in other parts of Asia, the state's role
remains important, for better and for worse. In Thailand, Buddhism
flourishes as the state religion, while in Cambodia, the faith is
still recovering from Pol Pot's murderous assault on monks and
religious institutions.
Asoka's patronage, however, was especially important in the history
of Buddhism, for he not only sustained the faith at an important
point in its development but spread it far beyond his own borders.
According to Buddhist accounts, two of his children brought Buddhism
to Sri Lanka, and another carried it to Central Asia. It was chiefly
from Sri Lanka, especially around the 12th century C.E., that
Buddhism spread to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and
Vietnam. But Buddhism also traveled by many other routes. Central
Asia became a major center of Buddhism by the first century C.E.,
and from there the faith spread along the Silk Road and into China
and Korea. It also traveled from India across the Bay of Bengal to
the region around Thailand. It was a two-way traffic. Pilgrims also
journeyed to India from China and other far-flung regions in search
of knowledge from the source.
They did not always find the same Buddhism - and for good reasons:
the Buddha's teachings were not even written down until several
centuries after his death, and sanghas existed in widely scattered
locales, many nurturing their own distinctive interpretations and
producing their own texts. Tradition has it that there were 18
different schools of Buddhism in these early days. But the main
division, arising as early as the first century B.C.E., separated
Hinayana Buddhists and reformist Mahayana Buddhists, who took for
themselves the mantle of "Greater Vehicle," sticking their rivals
with the "Lesser Vehicle" label.
There are within these great schools many lesser divisions.
Theravada Buddhism, with roots in the Hinayana tradition embraced
and transmitted by Asoka, is predominant in Southeast Asia. Mahayana
Buddhism includes many schools - including Zen in China, Korea,
Vietnam, and Japan, and Vajrayana in Tibet, and Jodo Shin Shu (or
the Pure Land) in Japan.
The Theravada-Mahayana division has its origins partly in
disagreements over the all-important rules of conduct governing
monks, and partly in disputes over the meaning of certain Buddhist
teachings about the nature of the self and the Buddha. Theravada
Buddhists are said to be "original" Buddhists in that they adhere to
the notion of the historical Buddha and the faith's early emphasis
on monks striving for enlightenment. Mahayana Buddhism offers a more
metaphysical reading of the Buddha, placing more emphasis on his
previous lives as bodhisattva, or aspirant to Buddhahood. Many
interpreters insist that Mahayana Buddhism makes the prospect of
achieving Buddahood more of a possibility for laypeople as well as
monks, and that it encourages all Buddhists, as bodhisattvas, to
work for the liberation of other people, just as the Buddha did. But
this distinction is debatable. What can be safely said is that
Mahayana Buddhism blurs the distinction between monk and laity far
more than classical Theravada did.
Everywhere it took root, Buddhism assumed a different coloration,
engaging the world as it adapted to local cultures and religious
practices. In many places, relatively simple and unorganized
animistic faiths prevailed, offering relatively little resistance to
Buddhism. In Thailand Buddhism encountered the phi, in Myanmar the
cult of nats. In Tibet, a form of Tantric Buddhism (itself related
to mystical Hindu Tantrism) that arrived in the 8th century C.E.
blended with the local Bon shamanism, creating a unique form of
Buddhism. By the end of the 16th century, Tibet had become a
Buddhist theocracy ruled by the Dalai (great ocean) Lama (teacher),
revered as an incarnation of Avolokitesvara, the kingdom's
protective deity. The current Dalai Lama is the 14th in this line.
Buddhism was most profoundly altered in China, Korea, and Japan,
where Mahayana Buddhists faced well-established and sophisticated
doctrines. In all of these countries, the monastic structure of
Indian Buddhism gradually yielded to a more laity-based religious
practice. In China, for example, Buddhism clashed with the secular,
pragmatic doctrines of the Confucian elite, who could hardly have
seen the "otherworldly" Buddhist pursuit of enlightenment and
Nirvana as anything but alien and threatening. The withdrawal of
monks from family and society, their dependence on others for their
support, and their claims of independence from worldly government
all cut distinctly against the Confucian grain. Chinese Taoism, too,
with its emphasis on the living and on achieving harmony with the
forces of nature, did not readily give way before Buddhism. So
Buddhism in its many forms accommodated itself to China, attaching
itself to existing doctrines where it could and adapting in other
cases. In the meditative traditions that developed in India, for
example, enlightenment is a goal realized only after many lifetimes
of arduous practice under great teachers, while in the most
authentically Chinese forms of Zen, enlightenment is a sudden,
spontaneous experience.
The coming of Western colonialism and Christianity beginning in the
16th century cast a pall over the Buddhist world. In Sri Lanka, for
example, by the time the Portuguese were expelled (by the Dutch) in
1658, some 150 years after their arrival, only five ordained
Buddhist monks remained. In places where the Westerners were less
zealous in their efforts to convert those they conquered or where
other circumstances were more auspicious, Buddhism fared better, but
only Thailand and Japan completely escaped colonization.
By the 19th century, resistance to colonial rule in many Asian
nations was beginning to coalesce around a new Buddhist nationalism.
In 1918, the leaders of the Young Men's Buddhist Association in
Rangoon used the British colonials' refusal to remove their shoes
when entering Buddhist pagodas to launch a campaign for Burma's
independence. The country's first leader after independence in 1948,
prime minister U Nu, saw himself in the tradition of the classical
Buddhist kings, and like other Buddhist nationalists often evoked
Asoka's name. Before he was displaced in a 1962 coup, he tried to
create a Buddhist socialism under which the basic material needs of
all citizens would be met by the state, freeing them to pursue
higher spiritual ends. Today many Buddhist monks risk prison or
death to publicly support Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi,
the leader of the democracy movement that struggles against the
military dictatorship established after U Nu.
To Americans, modern Buddhism's engagement with the world was most
memorably demonstrated in South Vietnam, where Buddhist protesters
helped bring down the corrupt Ngo Dinh Diem regime in 1963. That
year, the Venerable Thich Quang-Duc, one of many politically active
Buddhist monks, set himself on fire in Saigon to protest the Diem
regime's anti-Buddhist policies, an event engraved in the world's
consciousness by photojournalist Malcolm Browne's famous photograph.
The mobilization of Vietnam's Buddhist monks during the war years
helped lay the foundation for a new kind of Buddhist involvement in
the world.
During the past four decades, an international, ecumenical Buddhism
has emerged, led by a trio of remarkable men. The chief inspiration
for the worldwide "engaged Buddhist" movement, as it is known, has
been Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master and founder of the
Tiep Hien Order of Interbeing, an international organization of
laypeople, monks, and nuns headquartered at Plum Village, a
meditation retreat in southern France. Sulak Sivaraksa, a Thai
layman, has led efforts to fight rural poverty, prostitution, AIDS,
and drug abuse in his native country - often battling the Thai
government as well - and is the founder of the International Network
of Engaged Buddhists. The groups in this alliance are transforming a
monastery-based religion into a force against environmental
degradation and the economic pressures that are destroying the
social and cultural fabric of many developing countries. While
friendly to Christianity and other faiths of the West, the leaders
of this movement are critical of traditional Western views of nature
and Western materialism.
The world's most widely recognized representative of engaged
Buddhism is plainly the Dalai Lama. Living in exile in the northern
Indian city of Dharamsala, where he fled two years after communist
China occupied Tibet in 1957, he has gained worldwide stature. He
lectures around the world on human rights, economic justice, and
environmental protection, and challenges the international community
to bring pressure to bear on China to end its policies of ethnic
cleansing and ecological and cultural genocide in Tibet.
Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the Dalai Lama dispelled
any sense one might have of Buddhism as solely an otherworldly
religion. His speech included concrete proposals for Tibet and the
world, including the demilitarization of his native country and a
ban on the manufacture, testing, and stockpiling of nuclear weapons
around the world - a ban that is coming closer to realization every
day. His was not the speech of a monk locked away from the world in
a meditative trance. Indeed, he closed his address with a short
prayer that exemplifies the Buddhist spirit of engagement with the
world:
For as long as space endures, And for as long as living beings
remain, Until then may I, too, abide To dispel the misery of the
world.
Engaged Buddhism thus joins a long and honorable roll of Buddhisms
that have been born during the more than 2,500 years since the
nativity of the founder. It is this very heterodoxy and diversity -
so extreme that not all Buddhists bow to the same Buddha - that have
proved to be the faith's great strength over the centuries.
DONALD K. SWEARER is the Charles and Harriet Cox McDowell Professor
of Religion at Swarthmore College. His most recent book is The
Buddhist World of Southeast Asia (1996).