Compassion in Action — 2008-08-29

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 2-hour talk, Rob Hattam traces the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of socially engaged Buddhism, centring on the Dalai Lama’s distinctive approach to universal responsibility and compassion in modern conditions. Drawing on his doctoral research connecting Western philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism, Hattam unpacks the Dalai Lama’s dual project: preserving a deeply erudite scholarly tradition whilst translating Buddhist ethics into accessible secular language for global audiences. He examines how the Dalai Lama distinguishes spirituality from religion, arguing that ethics can be grounded in universal human desire for happiness without reliance on metaphysical claims, and explores the critical tension between personal transformation and social engagement. Through extensive quotes and analysis, Hattam shows how the Dalai Lama’s notion of universal responsibility demands concrete action across education, environment, politics and economics. He then opens extended dialogue with the audience on anger as an obstacle to justice work, the problem of linking personal and social transformation, contemporary interpretations of emptiness and interdependence, and how mystical experience survives within institutional religion. The talk assumes familiarity with Buddhist concepts and appeals particularly to practitioners grappling with the integration of dharma practice and social activism.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2008 08 29 CiA.mp3

UUID: 16899298-d701-43a1-8bc3-cd33b60cbbf1

Teacher: Rob Hattam

Collection: Compassion in Action (Rob Hattam)

Date: 2008-08-29

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Words: ~16,747

Refuge prayer three times as an appropriate beginning I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly By my practice of listening to the teachings and other perfections may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Assembly by my practice listening to the teachings and other perfections may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Supreme Assembly. By my practice of listening to the teachings and other perfections, may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. So I think this is the, the third in a sequence of seven, Friday nights. Just for the benefit of Henry. Henry.

Just go over the, you know, the basic thesis of the of my series of talks and then just introduce the various themes. So basically, this set of talks comes out of my own PhD thesis. So about, I don’t know, more than ten years ago, I was studying Western philosophies in response to some concerns I had about education because I was a math science teacher in secondary school interested in social justice. And at the same time having my own sort of existential issues that Western theory wasn’t all that sort of useful for really and came to Buddha House looking for some solutions. So I ended up having a sort of a schizoid, you know, life for a while, having two conversations going on.

Seemed that I needed to have those two talking to each other at some point. I had this opportunity to write a PhD and thought that I’d do that in my PhD. My thesis was a conversation between a particular type of Western philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism. So one one one one of those questions that I started to become interested in given that the sort of Western philosophy that I was interested in, about social justice. I I guess it’s sort of a Western view of liberation, really.

Was well, well, the it it it was sort of provoking me to to be thinking about socially engaged types of Buddhism. So I started looking for resources around that. So the series of talks that I’m giving are focusing on different versions of socially engaged Buddhism. So last week we had a look at some scriptural justifications. And most of the time, spent referring to some some thinking that I was doing around Nāgārjuna’s precious garland.

I don’t know whether you know that text. I have. So tonight, we’re doing the Dalai Lama. And then next week, there’s Thich Nhat Hanh. And the week after that’s Sulak Sivaraksa.

So we do a Tibetan Zen master and a Theravadan practitioner. So there’s socially engaged Buddhist renderings in all of those traditions. Then the week after that, we have a look at some sort of Western interpretations. And I’m hoping for a bit of fun that we can do the beats just for a little while. Don’t know.

Maybe someone can read the first, you know, few pages of Howl. And then the last the last week, just to sort of ponder what all that what all that might mean for for us all, I sort of had a go at trying to think through that through for myself and probably scared myself silly. I’m not quite sure where I sort of going with it, but it’s, you know, worthwhile sort of thinking about perhaps. So, yeah, tonight’s about the Dalai Lama. So you all know the Dalai Lama.

I don’t know if you know why why I’d be even talking about it. But, anyway, this is, you know, my own my own reading of the Dalai Lama, I suppose. So I do a bit of traveling recently in, you in the last few years, and so I spend a bit of time in airports. And that’s where I find out what the Dalai Lama’s been up to in terms of publishing in the last six months because the Dalai Lama dominates the airport book shops. So there’s books about the Dalai Lama by a range of people, but then there’s a whole range of books published by the Dalai Lama.

There’s at least two different types of texts that the Dalai Lama publishes, I think. Of them is incredibly erudite scholarly commentaries on key texts. I just sort of thought I’d crease some of the Dalai Lama’s books along just for show and tell. So there’s there’s the commentary on a Lama’s Lamp for the Path. I’m not sure whether this was the teaching he gave in Melbourne or so he’s given this commentary a few times.

Los Angeles. Los Los Angeles, is it? Yeah. So just just on the on the, you know, the sort of erudite scholarly Dalai Lama. After the after his recent trip to Sydney, which I didn’t go to and I apologized profusely, I bumped into this this woman that I’ve known for at a distance for, you know, twenty five years.

We sort of say hello to each other, and I think I went to college with her, you know, a long time ago. And she knows that I’m Buddhist and I know that she’s sort of interested in these sort of things that we know. Hello. Anyway, she she fronts me in the supermarket and wants to tell me that she’s been off to see the Dalai Lama. So and then she says to me that she was really, really disappointed.

I’m kinda how could anyone be disappointed at going to see the Dalai Lama? Anyway, she’s really, really disappointed because she couldn’t understand much of what he was saying. Mhmm. Because it was the erudite scholarly Dalai Lama giving the teaching on his you know, one of his favorite texts. And she was was there for something else that she had in mind, some more accessible western version of the Dalai Lama.

So but then there’s a whole range of other books that the Dalai Lama does publish, which is maybe the one that she was after, which is the text that I’m going to be talking about tonight, I suppose. So there is the sort of mind life series that he’s published. So he has this engagement with Western science that gets published occasionally. This is sort of a I think there’s about three, at least three in the series, mostly about the mind and brain science. But then there’s the Dalai Lama giving various lectures in places.

So this one’s Beyond Dogma, Reflections on the Millennium, Spirituality and Politics. There’s violence and compassion dialogues on today. Then this one’s the one that I’m going to be referencing mostly today, which might again, you probably read it anyway. The ethics for the new millennium, in which the Dalai Lama makes a case for secular ethics. Then there’s Kindness, Clarity and Insight, which was perhaps one of the first books I read about by the Dalai Lama, which again are quite sort of accessible pieces.

Some of it to do with Dalai topics and others to do with concerns of the present. Just even little ones, compassion in the individual, the global community and the need for universal responsibility, Worlds in harmony, dialogues on compassionate action. So he’s in sort of edited collections. The Dalai Lama at Harvard. And I don’t I just can’t keep up with the what the Dalai Lama publishes anymore because there’s sort of so much.

So he’s sort of out there and doing both of those things, being the scholar of his own tradition, but then engaging in, you know, conversations about, you know, the the present concerns of the of the globe. You mentioned the airport must have been I was coming back. You’re right. You hit the and in Singapore, there’s the Dalai Lama on business. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. Oh, Oh, yeah. He’s almost in every section. Yeah.

Invariably, I buy a new book about the by the Dalai Lama when I’m there. Yeah. So in this this tonight, then just trying to just trying to sort of make sense of the Dalai Lama as the the sort of contemporary sort of activist speaking to the, you know, the global concerns. I think one of the things that and I’ll narrate this a bit more in a minute when I read some of my text out. It appeared to me anyway, sort of reading through the Dalai Lama’s various versions of his sort of dialogues about politics generally speaking.

I think in the sort of early in the early years he was being a politician in relationship to his own country’s problem, which is still obviously really, really prominent when he does speak. But at a certain point he seemed to sort of universalise the concerns. So he moved to be not only talking about the politics of the sort of Tibetan condition, but then a whole range of other global issues, global peace and so on. So I’m not quite sure where that sort of happened, but it appears as though his know, his moral authority or, you know, he he he now speaks about a whole range of concerns, not just about the the Tibetan one. I think he’s also quite clever at being able to link the Tibetan concern to the whole range of other global issues as well.

Certainly when, again, didn’t hear him in Sydney, but he would have at some point given his update on where the sort of Tibetan issue was. In Melbourne, the year before last, he was certainly making a case for and this is one of his themes, I think sort of environmental issues and how the destruction of the Tibetan plateau is going to have huge impact on India and China in the future and so on. So he’s able to make a case for protecting the sort of Tibetan environment being more than just about the sort of Tibetan people. Anyway, one of the other things which which my own sort of cogitations have led me is, again, trying to sort of make sense of, you know, the the the sort of Dalai Lama’s political project and the way that he sort of argues his case, he quite clearly makes an argument out of his own tradition. So he’s referencing a sort of a Buddhist cosmology and his notion of universal compassion just code for Bodhicitta and the bodhisattva path that he’s managed to translate into a language that’s more accessible.

But he also invokes other traditions as well. So I think one of the things that Dalai Lama is very, very famous for, perhaps he’s the the the one of the most important figures in the world at the moment for making arguments for nonviolence. I can’t think of any other national leader that argues for nonviolence, even against, you know, opposition from within within his own country. Plenty of Tibetan activists that want that want to argue for, you know, a violent struggle with the Chinese. And and and again, trying to track his arguments, he he seems to have been inspired by Gandhi.

So he gets ideas about non violence from his own tradition but also from other leaders. So you go, well Gandhi made his own arguments for non nonviolence. People read Gandhi. Gandhi gets views of nonviolence from his reading of the Gita, but he also was inspired by Tolstoy. I think it was The letters they wrote.

Well, there was a particular text of Tolstoy’s that’s very famous, the the kingdom of god within. I think that’s what it’s called. Yeah. So Gandhi, the Hindu, gets his some of his inspiration for nonviolence from a Russian Christian text. So you get a Buddhist leader being inspired by a Hindu’s rendition of leader Christianity, which is incredibly interesting the way the sort of ideas are sort of moving around.

Again, some work that I’ve been doing recently in part of my other in my educational work still. I’m incredibly interested in anti racist teaching as a consequence of some moves that I’ve been making in my own sort of research. One of the things that’s become quite clear to me, and, again, it’s, you know, having sat on the cushion in here or in, you know, the old Buddha house for a decade, the one of the things that’s sort of going on around racism or anti racism is there’s a huge amount of anger. So as an educator, one of the problems that I’m really, really interested in now is how does one think past anger as an incredibly important idea for teachers. Think, again, if you’re interested in anti racism then what tends to happen with anti racist work is that you’re incredibly angry at the sort of, you know, the injustice of it all.

This sort of indignation arises as the first emotion. And lots of the writing and practices around anti racist work is driven by anger actually or some form of indignation at the injustice. And in fact the whole field seems to be completely you know anger’s naturalised. It just comes with the territory. And so teaching practices that are supposedly anti racist are arising out of a sort of naturalisation of anger, which again, as a Buddhist seems to me to be not all that useful in the end.

How does one think past anger? So anyway, that’s the the sort of Buddhist question that I’m posing inside of that in that sort of whole area. So a Cypriot friend of mine and I and I have written a paper on I’m trying to you know, arguing what’s anger got to do with it, trying to sort of think past anger. And, you know, so we’re we’re having a go at trying to trot out a sort of a post anger move in this particular field. And so tracking just the Dalai Lama’s, you know, where he gets his conceptual resources from, it turns out to be quite sort of interesting.

So you’ve got you’ve got, you know, thinking past anger resources inside of the Buddhist tradition. There’s some inside of the Hindu tradition, certainly in, you know, the Russian Christian mystics. You can track some back to the stoics. Seneca has huge long text on on anger, which if he hadn’t met a Buddhist, then I’ve you know, it’s incredibly familiar arguments inside of Seneca. The American transcendentalists, apparently, they’re quite interesting.

Walt Whitman and Thoreau, maybe. Thoreau. Yeah. So there’s again, they’re probably drawing on forms of Christianity. You know, one of the one of the things that, you know, in in that sort of search is have you read, you know, Matthew recently in the Bible?

It’s incredibly powerful text. Again, a a Buddhist feels quite comfortable with it. Very powerful and very moving. Yeah. Anyway, so you’ve got the Dalai Lama amongst all that amongst all that a lot.

I think too there were connections compulsory Gandhi and through, you know, the American civil rights movement, you know, as a model of, you know, the Gandhi and nonviolent. Well, Martin Luther Martin Luther King Junior was awfully, you know, inspired by Gandhi. And, of course, he has his own he he he was inspired by the by the transcendentalists as well. That’s really just interesting, like you say, how these ideas move around How they move around fertilizing. Yeah.

Of course, you’ve got, I mean, in the paper that we were writing, we were, you know, as as a way being able to stage our argument, we were saying, well, you you you to to to try and locate some post anger conceptual resources, perhaps you could review the the the lives of people with the Nobel Peace Prize, and we picked Martin Luther King Junior, Nelson Mandela, and and the Dalai Lama, of course, being the obvious examples. And Nelson Mandela, of course, was awfully inspired also by Gandhi, who was in South Africa, who some, you know, impact on the way that the anti apartheid struggle was being was being conceived of. So you’ve got the there’s some of the big luminaries that that that sort of inspire us all being under the influence of these probably small number of texts actually when track it back and that’s basically being contained within the, you know, the the old, you know, religious traditions. Not sure about Seneca, about where he’s getting his ideas from. But, again, if he’s if he hasn’t met a Buddhist in the Greek court, then some of mediteachings in those Greek texts about death and so on.

They’re, as I say, very, very familiar. Yeah. Often just expressed differently to super cultural background, but the essence of the idea is the thing isn’t, you know Yeah. What’s being picked up and then translated into another culture. I guess from that concern of mine about anger, that does seem to be very, very weird though, don’t you think, about having some way of being able to think past it Yeah.

Given the how sort of naturalized it is? That that that to consider thinking past anger is seen to be so aberrant, actually. Just a follow-up anger. Well, that’s right. Yeah.

But then it’s it appears as though you can’t repress it because that makes you ill. So there is it isn’t easy to get past it, but but then, you know, there there are there are some some versions of thinking thinking or getting past that that are available and some you know, how we sort of think about those. Anyway, the Dalai Lama. I just wanna read some things. So, yeah, the Dalai the Dalai Lama’s writing on socially engaged Buddhism’s incredibly extensive, one can’t review the whole corpus in, you know, one night.

So we’ve got a sort of much more modest task that just aims to outline briefly his argument for Buddhist social engagement. The Dalai Lama is the most renowned for his work as the leader of the Tibetan government exile and his struggle for the independence of Tibet. It’d be possible to map his socially engaged sensibility in terms of that aspect of his work, but his life in exile has meant that his views on social engagement and his own practice as a Buddhist activist must be considered in terms of a global struggle for peace. It will be his attempt to rethink the nature of socially engaged Buddhism as a universal practice that interests me in this section. Quite clearly, theory of social engagement is informed by his own Gelugpa education and might be understood to revolve around the idea of universal responsibility, which is the term that he uses to name the bodhisattva motivation, an idea that was described in the previous chapter in my work around, you know, relative bodhicitta.

I pointed out that the Tibetan Buddhist view of the bodhisattva path is traditionally described in terms of a personal practice or what Robert Thurman calls individualist transcendentalism. However, as I argued in that section, such a view is not world-denying but can be understood in terms of compassionate action. In the Lama’s own words: ‘When you practice, you do not isolate yourself from the rest of society.’ What is significant in the Dalai Lama’s recent writing has been his elaboration on the nature of compassionate action and his reworking of the idea of universal responsibility in the light of our increased interconnectedness. The Dalai Lama has spoken of the idea of universal responsibility often and recently been defining universal responsibility in ways that do not require a study of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. Of course, he has developed his own activist project through applying his idea of universal responsibility to his non violent struggle with the Chinese over Tibetan self determination.

But his project has evolved as a consequence of being forced out of the isolation of Tibet, being brought into contact with contemporary society. He proposes a view of universal responsibility that’s both secular and spiritual. He’s been attempting to universalise the idea of universal responsibility. Often the terms spiritual and secular are understood to be incompatible, or at least in quite a degree of tension. But perhaps a Buddhist view of the spiritual, one that does not rely on a belief in God, might approach what is often understood to be secular.

And so a secular spirituality might not be so absurd. I think this is where the Dalai Lama’s engagement in ethics for the new millennium is sort of quite interesting in, you know, the secular west given that he doesn’t believe in God being one of the problems that the secular west has. His argument relies on a careful distinction between the religious spiritual. And even though he asserts that he’s trying to quote to reach beyond the formal boundaries of his own Tibetan Buddhist position, his argument does rely heavily on Tibetan Buddhist ideas. Having said that, his argument does warrant serious consideration for the way he rethinks what it means to practice the Bodhisattva path.

His argument has been outlined in the book Ethics for a New Millennium. His argument revolves around the view that there is basic sameness about being human. We all desire to be happy and to avoid suffering. One of the classic tropes in the Dalai Lama. Who is it?

It’s not Thurman. It’s the Hopkins. Hopkins does the does an, you know, beautiful rendering of, you know, following the Dalai Lama around for years and years and years. Almost invariably, when he lands in a place, he’ll say, we’re all the same and goes on with that as his opening move. And that’s You’re running as translating.

Yeah. Yeah. So the the notion of where that we’re the the sort of equality of us all is, you know, a basic stepping off point for his argument, you know, whichever country he’s in, which is incredibly interesting, really, given that mostly we’re trying to find differences. And wherever the Dalai Lama arrives, he’s saying that we’re all the same, which is quite radical. Yeah.

For the Dalai Lama, this desire or inclination is a fundamental aspiration. But fulfilling this dream of happiness seems to have linked closely to has been linked closely to material progress, at least in the West, which has again, quote from the Dalai Lama, ‘disproven religion yet overlooked the limitations of science’. For the Dalai Lama, the material progress of the West has not brought happiness, but instead, those living in the materially developed countries are absorbed in the idea of acquiring still more, and are plagued with mental and emotional suffering, and seem confused with what constitutes morality. I think it’s one of the things I enjoy about going and listening to the Dalai Lama is the way that he sort of takes potshots at, you know, the material’s life and how silly it is. Might have even been when he was in Adelaide years and years ago.

Remember when he was he was speaking at the conventions and the the on the convention center. The entertainment center. The entertainment center and telling the I think he’s told this told this story many times. He goes and stays with Westerners and looks in their medicine cupboard and finds all their antidepressants and so on and so on. Anyway, modern Western livings, again, the Dalai Lama, organize so it demands the least possible direct dependence on others.

And whilst this autonomy has benefits, these developments undermine the view that our experience is dependent upon others. This in turn encourages us to suppose that because others are not important for my happiness, their happiness is not important for me, unquote. The inner suffering of those living within Western materially developed countries is further exacerbated by the tendency towards competitiveness and envy and the perceived need to keep up, excuse me, Dalai Lama is careful in his argument not to idealize old ways of life. Again, the quote from him, the challenge we face is to find some means of enjoying the same degree of harmony and tranquility as those of more traditional communities while benefiting from material development. For the Dalai Lama, this process must involve a spiritual revolution.

So whilst the term spirituality is an unusual one for the scholar addicted to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Dalai Lama is keen to contribute to the ongoing transmission and translation of the Mahāyāna tradition. I I found it quite odd when I read that book actually that the Dalai Lama was using the word spirituality. Certainly not a word that’s used inside of Buddha house or it’s not you you don’t find spirituality in the Lamrim texts or, you know, in the in in the in the sort of canon. So I I I It’s a concept, is it? I don’t know.

I don’t know where the category comes from, but, you know, it’s it’s all you know, it’s it’s out there, isn’t it? I mean, one would have thought that, you know, Tibetan Buddhist religion, you know, you could easily make the case for that. But they’re using the word sort of spirituality. Again, I I just you know, I I found I’ve just found it really, really incredibly novel that the Dalai Lama was, you know, making a making a case or or using that category in a sort of positive sense. He’s he was claiming it seriously in the opening move in a book that’s making an argument for secular ethics.

The term spirituality is one of the key words of what I understand to be an emerging mystical society and is open to ongoing reinterpretation and contestation. And just in terms of sort of, you know, mystical society, one of the one of the you know, when I was trying to write my own thesis, the there are there are some, you know, cultural theorists in the in the in the Western philosophical tradition that I that I was reading in that were were were seeing what what what what one of them was was referring to as the, you know, the the emergence of mystical society. And basically, the argument went something like under under sort of Western modernity, the scientific revolution kills god, which leaves a huge vacuum in the in the in the the the social space. And so in its place arises capitalism and consumerism, and and this this sort of this sort of peaks in our in our time when that that’s what’s left to us really is just to consume. So postmodern consumption, I mean, we can’t be political.

All we can do is just buy more and try and consume us consume consume ourselves out of our angst, which which quite clearly doesn’t work. And so, this this guy is basically arguing that the the the the sort of the the Western postmodern, religion of consumption’s exhausting itself and people are people are looking for, you know, ways of dealing with with with their anxiety and you can’t consume your way out of it so there’s a return to the sort of old tradition so to speak in various ways or there’s emergence of the new age however you to talk to that. By drug induced disease. Well, are there, aren’t they? That’s right.

Yeah. But then maybe, you know, you read the Don Juan books. You know, maybe that’s a return of the old traditions as well. I did anyway when I was in my twenties. I think I bought everyone.

I was just so excited when there was a new one. Anyway, not surprisingly, Tibetan Buddhism seems to be a part of the, you know, the mystical society. How many western, you know, how many western derma centers are there? How many countries are the FPMT in now? It was twenty five last time I looked.

I’m not sure. It’s much greater than that. Twenty six, I was gonna say. And then, you know, NKT and new Kadampa, if can we say that here? Zen centers.

I know there was some when I was in Japan recently, Japanese scholars were almost arguing that there’s more zen going on in San Francisco than there is in Japan. Anyway, the Dalai Lama’s view of spirituality is clearly dis is clearly distinguished from religion, which he defines in these terms. This is the Dalai Lama on religion. Religion’s concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual prayer, and so on.

Spirituality on the other hand is defined, again, this is from the Dalai Lama by some level of concern for others’ well-being. You can see that he’s invoking his own tradition, but I know my partner found a postcard that’s got what has it got in the Dalai Lama’s religion being kind to others. I mean, this this idea is Religionist calling. That’s the one. That’s it.

Yeah. So it’s out there. He’s he’s doing it in various ways right down to the the postcard. The spiritual person in this case practices love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, which bring happiness to both self and others. Such a person in cultivating these characteristics.

Such a view of spirituality is not otherworldly magical or mysterious but rather is a call for a radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self. Another quote: It’s a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected and for conduct which recognises others’ interests alongside of our own. But to presume some level of concern for others’ well-being must infer some form of ethical practice. And where do we go for advice on ethics? Of course, we could go to the religions for an answer to that question, but religious belief is no guarantee of moral integrity.

Neither can religious belief provide a set of rules or laws that provide us with the answer to every ethical dilemma. A formulaic approach to living an ethical life can never hope to capture the richness and diversity of human experience. However, we do need to find a way to adjudicate between, for example, terrorism as a means to political reform and Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of peaceful resistance as just an example. We need to find some way of avoiding the extremes of crude absolutism on one hand and the trivial relativism on the other. At this point in his argument, the Dalai Lama returns to the view of the equality of humanness that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.

If we can accept that such a disposition is universal, then it might be possible to imagine ethics based on whether or not an act harms or does violence to others’ experience or expectation of happiness. This definition requires elaboration on what it means to act ethically. The Dalai Lama outlines three factors that should be considered: the consequence, the nature of the act and the underlying motivation. For him, the most significant factor is the underlying motivation or, in Tibetan, the individual’s how do you pronounce that? Kunlong.

Kunlong translate literally as what drives or inspires our actions and denotes individual’s overall start state of heart and mind. I don’t know. I think I came along to Buddha House for five years before I actually worked out that readjusting motivation was actually the whole path. I thought it was just a preliminary. I’m I’m a slow learner.

Dear. Anyway, I sometimes wonder why Rinpoche spent so much time on it at the beginning. Why he just didn’t get to the point, but he was always. You’re after the next bit always, but that really was the point. Anyway, often this term is translated as motivation or disposition even though these terms do not capture the full range of meaning in intended.

That our underlying motivation is the most important factor when considering ethics is easily understood, especially when powerful negative thoughts and emotions such as hatred and anger affect our actions. No matter what we might say our long term intentions towards others are whilst under the influence of these powerful emotions, our actions are invariably injurious of others’ happiness. The more that we’re under the influence of these powerful negative emotions, the more likely it is that our actions will harm others. But the reverse also holds true. When our basic disposition is one of compassion, then our actions will tend automatically to contribute to others’ well-being.

The aim of spiritual and therefore ethical practice is to transform and perfect the individual’s Kunlong. We find that the more we succeed in transforming our hearts and mind through cultivating spiritual qualities, the better able we are to cope with adversity and the greater likelihood that our actions will be ethically wholesome. This argument then leads to the obvious question: how can we cultivate the basic disposition or this overall state of heart and mind that manifests a concern for others’ well-being? The Dalai Lama proposes that we give some thought to the nature of reality itself. That we consider what we mean when we think of happiness and that we think more careful about the nature of love and compassion.

Concerning the first of these, he recommends that we work with the fact that there is often a gap between the way in which we perceive phenomena and the reality of a given situation and that such a gap often the source of much unhappiness. This problem of misperception usually arises because we tend to isolate a particular event or experience in ways that ignore that all things and events arise in dependence on a complex web of interrelated causes and conditions. But is this insight helpful in the consideration of what’s ethical or not? The Dalai Lama reminds us that working with a view that our individual well-being is ultimately connected both with that of all others and with the environment within which we live. Such a view also demands that we see that our every action, our every deed, word and thought, no matter how slight or inconsequential it may seem, an implication not only for ourselves but for others too.

If we’re prepared to work with the idea of radical interdependence, we come to see that the sharp distinction between self and others is an exaggeration. The very concept of self is relative and is no more substantial than a rainbow. Again, unquote. But its very relativity is a strong argument for taking much more seriously the idea that actions have results. It is not that things and events do not exist but they exist interdependently.

Such a view does not infer nihilism. Radical interdependence demands that we reject an ethics based on thinking that self is somehow separate from others. Because all of our interests are interconnected, it makes sense that ethics must be based on being concerned about the welfare of others. The Dalai Lama argues this when he considers the nature of happiness. He distinguishes between two forms of happiness.

One that pleases the senses and, hence, is transient, and the other he refers to as genuine happiness or inner peace. From a materialist standpoint, happiness is understood in terms of gratifying the senses and involves living out the mythology that money can buy happiness. Of course, money is necessary for those things we need to survive, but placing too much hope in material development is a mistake. The problem is not with materialism as such, but rather with the assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Living life with a view to seeking happiness through appeasing the senses may not be that different from what the addict feels when indulging his or her habit.

Temporary relief is soon followed by craving for more. The alternative to craving a sensory type of happiness that requires some outside factor is inner peace. Inner peace for the Dalai Lama is defined in terms of a basic attitude or sense of our own well-being that is not undermined even when we are confronted with difficulties. But how can we cultivate this inner peace? In the first instance, there’s no external factor that can create it.

Inner peace can only be cultivated through transforming our own mind. For the Dalai Lama, if we want to cultivate a genuine happiness, then we need to transform our basic attitude into one that is based on developing altruism. Inner peace can only be possible if we abandon a life that’s motivated by narrow self interest and replace that with one that is concerned with the well-being of others. Such a motivation, the Dalai Lama calls the supreme emotion, which has two dimensions, love and compassion. Up to this point, the Dalai Lama’s represented the logic contained within the Lam Rim and this is, again, just retrieving his argument out of out of, you know, the opening move of this book.

If in somewhat simplified form, but we’re all sort of familiar with that sort of set of arguments, I think. Without reliance on specialist terms such as karma or Bodhicitta. Not surprisingly, his outline of the way to cultivate the supreme emotion, which is the word that he uses in this text, is also reliant on the logic of the Lojong or mind transformation teachings. He proposes a two pronged approach. On the one hand, we need to restrain those factors which inhibit compassion, and on the other, we need to cultivate those which are conducive with it.

And you’re all familiar with them with both of those. Finally, the Dalai Lama proposes that compassion can be developed beyond our feelings of partiality such that it is unconditional, undifferentiated, and universal in scope. I don’t know how again, I think we’ve I think we’ve said this one last week and the week before. I think the first time that I heard Rinpoche give a sort of teaching on universal compassion, it was an idea that I thought I felt quite comfortable with and sort of aspired after. But then the more that I thought about the way that was put was truly sort of extraordinary.

I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone actually giving that version of what was possible for others. I think I kept coming back week after week after week to hear more elaboration on what seemed to be the most amazing idea I’d ever heard even though that again you sort of felt like you’d wanted that for yourself but no one had articulated it quite so clearly or even made it so available or even that it might be something possible that I could cultivate. You know what I mean? Quite unbelievable idea. Sorry about that.

The development of such a form of compassion, though, is not seen as an end in itself. Instead, this great compassion becomes a stable, continuous, and undeniable undeniable disposition. Again, that comes back to that idea about the, you know, the core motivation. Anyway, I think, again, that all sounds quite sort of familiar. I think what was what what the next move in this book and represented in some of his other essays is what’s sort of more interesting to me I think.

I think it’s easy enough to be able to practice a view of compassionate action from withinside of the sort of Lam Rim tradition and we think we’re sort of quite familiar with the sort of arguments. But thus far, the Dalai Lama’s argument follows this traditional view. In part, his argument’s based on the view that until we’ve actually stabilized some level of love and compassion, we’re under the influence of the afflicted emotions and hence can only be of limited benefit to others. Here’s a big slab of quote. In the beginning of Buddhist practice, our ability to serve others is limited.

The emphasis is on healing ourselves, transforming our mind and heart. But as we continue we become stronger and increasingly able to serve others. But until that time we may get overwhelmed by the suffering and difficulties of other people. We may become exhausted and not able to serve others effective, not to mention ourselves. So we must begin simply by doing as well as we can trying to improve ourselves and at the same time trying as much as we can to serve other people.

It’s natural to fill some limitations with both and we just have to accept that. I found that quite useful in my own thesis and, you know, my own life. The aim is to develop an active form of compassion that goes beyond the distortions and afflictions of your own mind. That is in terms of calming and eventually dispelling anger and so forth. Again, another big quote.

While there is something that needs to be done in the world to rectify the wrongs with a motivation of compassion, if one is really concerned with benefit, it’s not enough simply to be compassionate. There is no direct benefit in that. With compassion, one needs to be engaged and involved. On the one hand, there’s one does whatever one can to develop one’s love and compassion. But then on the other hand, he’s saying that that’s not enough.

That with compassion one needs to be engaged and involved. So it’s not a matter of just cultivating a compassionate mind. It’s gotta be active. I don’t think the two are contradictory, but you can see there’s some tension there. Such a view of compassionate action can only make sense if we’re responding to the issues of our social context.

Understanding the nature of contemporary society is essential for compassionate action. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that, quote, today’s social reality is so complex and on the material level at least so clearly interconnected that conceiving of ethical practice only in terms of the need for individual transformation is no longer adequate. He cites the examples of the globalisation of economics, that a stock market crash on one side of the globe can have a direct effect on the economics of countries on the other side and the impact of technology on the environment. And here was sort of, you know, my question. But what does it mean to cultivate universal responsibility in postmodern conditions?

For the perspective of universal responsibility, he outlined some general directions and identified some significant struggles that require urgent attention. So I went looking for his advice about what to do in terms of the present. In outlining these general directions, he begins by reaffirming that universal responsibility infers a reorientation of our heart and mind away from self towards all others and without partiality. So he continually makes the basic point. The aim to cultivate and practice universal responsibility involves taking personal responsibility for the well-being of all others.

The practice of universal responsibility then, and this was I hope this makes sense. Then must be by definition counter hegemonic in the sense of countering those aspects of culture that harm others. I don’t know whether people are familiar with the word hegemony. It comes from an Italian Marxist called Gramsci who developed a theory of hegemony which is basically a sort of a political idea that argues that the way that power works is it installs itself in our consciousness by naturalizing the oppressive conditions. We come to view them as being inevitable.

The present, the neoliberal logic of the presence. There’s certain inevitabilities built into it. We take that as being inevitable. There’s no other alternative on offer. There’s no one left to vote for is the teacher I wanted to make.

Against the greed, envy and aggressive competitiveness encouraged by a culture of excessive materialism, the Dalai Lama recommends the cultivation of contentment. He argues that we need to counter the culture of perpetual economic growth that fosters discontent, contributes to the growing economic inequality that’s emerging everywhere and also seems to be the source of damage to our natural environment. Universal responsibility also demands a commitment to honesty which helps reduce the level of misunderstanding, doubt and fear throughout society. Honesty also involves not being blind to various injustices that distort societies and the commitment to speak out against these. A sense of universal responsibility means countering the urge to ignore the diseased and the marginalised and to, quote, ensure that the sick and afflicted person never feels helpless, rejected or unprotected.

Central to the Lama’s view of universal responsibility is the practice of compassion. But in a postmodern context, compassion must be extended to both the individual and society. In that sense, compassion belongs in the political arena too, to quote Dalai Lama, and will require that we engage in a number of significant social arenas. The Dalai Lama mentions education, the media, our natural environment, politics and economics, peace and disarmament, and interreligious harmony. Each of these arenas requires our engagement because the stakes are so high if we do not.

Act. Whilst the Dalai Lama does not provide any specific advice about how these arenas might be reformed, his argument constantly shuttles along a dialectic of personal and social transformation, such as, quote, the need to disarm ourselves internally, which then creates the conditions for disarmament and dismantling military establishments, as you know, one of his examples. And that’s where else that’s where I’ll stop. And there’s sort of a note there, really. So that’s the Dalai Lama.

So there’s in there, really. So comments, questions? Everyone’s doing their study of the Dalai Lama, so What have you found there? You’ve got one man acting as the probably within Buddhism as far as I know in my group, taking that sort of stance to the secular world, not just the Buddhist world. Who else have we got in the Buddhist world who actually takes that same sort of stance in the same sort of arena and doesn’t address it just to the Buddhist community?

Thich Nhat Hanh does. Yeah? Again, the Thai activist that I’ll talk about in a couple of weeks time in his own context does. A guy called Sulak Sivaraksa who’s been jailed by the Thai authorities for speaking back. And he’s got wonderfully profound critiques of Western development in Asian countries that I find incredibly compelling which are all informed by his Buddhist stuff.

Burmese woman that they’ve arrested and stuck in jail, all of her stuff’s informed by her Buddhist sensibility. There was also a series of Buddhist monks in Burma who stood for election and formed a section of parliament there as well. Oh yeah. I think that’s in Sri Lanka, isn’t it? Was it Sri Lanka?

Yeah. That’s Sri Lanka. Not Burma. There’s a Sri Lankan movement that Joanna Macy studied Right. Yeah.

That’s quite famous that I could have written a chapter on as well. Well, I mean, one of the things that was interesting about Burma this year was the monks got out on the street and got bashed. I think I was probably getting That was quite interesting, really. So they did the same in Sri Lanka as well. This massive Buddhist demonstration.

But except they weren’t sort of mad guts and stuff like that because that’s the point isn’t it? That’s the point that I’ve sort of come into from this discussion though. Here we are, we’ve got Don and I’m talking about the need for people to have personal change demilitarise yourselves before demilitarise the world. I mean one of the things that I find interesting, you know, and this was where I, this was my thesis in the end came down to what is probably a fairly banal idea. The impossibility of disentangling personal and social transformation.

That’s the thesis. So when I go and read the sort of Western tradition, mostly what’s being argued there is that the problems are socially constructed and so it s all about arguments for changing outside self actually. So a struggle about social transformation is really what s being argued for. And the personal dimension of those projects are sort of a minor key at best. Now when you go to some renderings of the Buddhist tradition what I’m arguing in my thesis is mostly you get the personal transformative described incredibly thoroughly but the socially transformative project’s not that well articulated except for these quite exceptional Buddhist practitioners that are trying to make an argument that both of them are actually going together.

I guess that’s what my thesis is being trying to think through actually. How does the personal and the social transformative project feed off of each other? The moral reargument or resurgence it’s now called. This is the Christian fundamentalist in America are you talking No, no, no I’m not. I’m talking about, actually, I’m not sure if he was an Indian guy who is now living in England, has for forty years or whatever, and has worked on the basis of changing the self in order to bring social change.

Oh, okay. And also has a very strong So social action path to their work as well. Oh yeah, I don’t know that, mom. Because I mean, when you go into say, say, one of the key places that one can study Western social movements is in feminism for instance. So, if you study Western feminist discourses then, I’m glad that Suzanne’s not here because I can get away with this.

Probably about twenty years ago there’s an attempt to try and confront this problem about the internal and external. And so they start looking for resources and of course internally to the sort of Western tradition about the only thing that’s on offer at the moment is sort of psycho analysis. So feminism starts to actually try and marshal sort of psychoanalytic categories to sort of help it think through this problem and what happens of course is that there becomes disconnect between the personal and the social and you end up with a sort of a psychoanalytic feminism where you just fix yourself up and so the social project becomes so theoretically in the western tradition and the eastern tradition is how do you maintain the strong link between the personal and the social is the struggle actually. Because it’s so easy for one part of it just to wither because you just put emphasis on the other bit. And I think one of the reasons why I wanted to carefully rehearse the Dalai Lama’s own version of it in the first half of this book is once you accept the sort of radical interdependence then one’s act of becoming compassionate can’t be seen just for self, and that’s nonsense.

This was a real group, what he did was, the guy who started it walked, he was Pakistani, and he walked from Pakistan right through the top of India into Europe, around Europe, carrying nothing. And the idea was that he would live only by the generosity of others in order to challenge himself and to actually trust the world and to You can’t remember his name? No, I’m sorry, I can’t, on a Friday night I can’t, but I’ll find it and I’ll get to the Yeah, okay, that’s interesting isn’t it? It is. But he’s done this a number of times now as well.

When he writes, there’s a journal that comes out on a regular basis as well that he writes. And one of the latest things that he’s doing is looking at, in a consumerist society, he’s promoting the people to clear a bread making day so that people actually make their own bread, kneading and so on, on the basis of connecting again with the source of things and the process of people looking after their own needs at a very basic level for connection with the world. For me, I’ve got friends who get the magazine and I’ve read the book that they lent me and all that sort of stuff. And adopted that process as well. And really, it’s their form of meditation in lots of ways.

Yeah. It’s the meditation they practice at least once a week with the breath making. Yeah, okay. And he’s saying we should all take on this. So, that’s a real attempt to link the personal with the social in ways which are both symbolic and recognizable, but also in the end mind changing and world changing.

Yeah. It was one of the things that, you know, as a consequence of my own sort of cogitations here, I’m quite sort of keen on any version of when people try to articulate a, you know, the self and the social together. I’ve, you know, recently also done some more research around, you know, reconciliation as a site where some of this might happen and reading through the, you know, and taking an interest in the Australian Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. In that project, they’re articulating personal and social transformation Mhmm. You know, together as a as a project.

And so when you do hear it, it does sound very novel even though for hippies it feels quite comfortable but you know what I mean? Terms of the Yeah, was thinking of the Reconciliation Commission in South Africa I think is that something? Yeah, Yes, wherever there’s reconciliation projects then I think it’s a defining feature of the project that that thesis is being articulated. Personal and social transformative work sort of goes together. And there’s also a training in reformative justice as well, working on people who are offenders, not seeing them as the cause of their own.

Yeah. Well in end, it’s sort of an alternative to revenge. Yes it is. And again it’s getting past anger so if you try to have a framework in the social to get past anger and revenge, then what’s the alternative? Again, they seem so novel because I don’t know how you go.

Watching the news every night’s half an hour of revenge narratives and Hollywood movies. You know what I mean? Like we’re so inculcated into revenge as the narrative. So my question would be in the respect of Dalai Lama would be, would he actually be doing this now if he wasn’t in exile from Tibet? Well.

Well. And what’s your thought with the It’s a good question. Yeah, with the unrest in Tibet. I mean, the Dalai Lama is on several occasions trying to resign, mean, resign as what? Resign as Dalai Lama or resign Well, he’s the head of the Tibetan government in exile, isn’t he?

He runs that. So theoretically could have reincarnated Dalai Lama resign? No he could resign from his political post. Because I mean studying the history of Tibet you realise that within the schools there’s struggles for sort of, you know, theological dominance which then means that you’re the political leader. I mean, anyone who’s interested in the Tibetan struggle realizes that there’s activists within the Tibetan community community that think that Dalai Lama is wrong and there’s a lot of contestation around that being played out and has been for quite some decades.

You know, the Dalai Lama be very, very aware of the young men in this community in the diaspora that think his projects have failed one and you know, they need to get more active, you know, militarily or in, you know, know, you know, to up the ante and have violent struggle. I mean, of the things, you know, when you’re interested, I mean, to be interested in that sort of thing, if you read Nelson Mandela’s book and try and understand the way that he was conceiving of the violent struggle inside of post apartheid, their actually against material installations and not against people. That was the argument because I mean I saw an interview that Mandela gave when he was the head of the ANC when he was a young man, before he was sort of put in jail, when he was arguing his politics and seemed to me to be quite clear that he already had the end in sight where there was going to be a negotiation where you had to sit at the table with the enemy. And if there had been violent, certain types of violent struggle make that negotiation very, very difficult.

I don’t know, something that I’ve become, as a consequence of all of that, one of the things that I’m more and more interested in is, what do I call it, coming back from hell. What entails. Say who? Well, you know, again, you’re interested in reconciliation, then lots of reconciliation projects are actually national reconstructions coming back from hell. Rwanda, East Timor, South Africa.

If you’re an indigenous person in Australia, you know, know, there’s literally sort of a hell realm on earth. So, you know, once you’re in hell, how do you come back from it? I think this is sort of a serious question. Cambodia. Or if you’re trying to avoid hell, how do you mean, it’s easy enough to descend into hell, so how does one avoid hell?

But of course hell in those circumstances, not at all but in some of those circumstances at the same time it was held there by people who were in heaven. Yes. That they’re just jealous. That’s right. One of the things that’s sort of interesting being, if you’re trying to do the East West thing and live in the West, then how do you make the case for the efficacy of Eastern philosophies in places apart from safe sites like Buddha House then I’ve you know, as a sort of a case in point, about three or four years ago I’ve been collecting up friends that work in universities that are sort of interested in Eastern philosophies who use them in whatever ways they can.

So we put on a symposium at an Educational Research Association conference and no one had ever done a Buddhist symposium in the conference s history. People hardly do religion because religious studies, nuts, no one takes seriously. So we put this symposium on and thought there’d be five of us talking to each other and there were about thirty five people turned up which was a pretty big crowd in this conference and some sort of serious scholars from America were sort of in the room and so on which was quite of heartening. We were putting the case for there being positive conceptual resources with inside of religious traditions. Was What conceptual research?

Well like post anger or developing positive things that if you go to other sessions that were secular that were arguing for you know justice and social justice where do you get the resources from? So mostly in secular education conferences they’re not getting their resources from religious traditions or if they are they’re actually fudging and not saying. So to come out and say there are some positive resources is novel. So this colleague who’s a really important sort of professor in one of the US universities who s a guy from Melbourne. He sort of worked on me for three breaks after that in lunch and afternoon tea and so on coming up to me saying how in America at the moment and this was sort of in the height of the sort of bush years, we’re trying to defend the secular at the moment against the religious and you’re trying to make an argument for positive resources from the religious.

This is too confusing for our politics and so he was incredibly put out by our argument because the sort of political project in America at that stage was defending yourself against the religious and it’s the religious right. Because of the right. Yeah, yeah. The way that the right has adopted and invaded the religious space, taken it over in fact. So anyone who wants to mount a case for a sort of progressive project from that space is seen as very, very, you know, and I guess again you’ve the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, there’s all these political figures that actually do make the case for a very progressive politics using you know religious resources.

The other, with the American theme at the moment there’s a significant number of books written by Buddhists or people who have drawn on Buddhist thinking to argue for compassionate capitalism. Yeah. Now within that there’s real dilemmas in what you’re saying is you can have a healthy capitalism, that is, a society driven by consumerism, is, and at least managed greed, if not uncontrolled greed. I guess it depends whether or not you equate capitalism with greed doesn’t it? Whether it’s possible to conceive of capitalism outside of greed.

That’s right. I’m not quite sure. I don’t know how elastic the category is but But Gordon Gekko said greed is good. The machine is the oil that lubricates any real sense of industry. That part of compassionate capitalism And it could be an oxymoronic term, that’s what you’re saying.

Yeah, that’s right. But that is actually a lot bigger in the United States than Australia, for Because a lot of corporate Americans do actually donate very generously. Philanthropists. Yes. Philanthropists.

Whereas the Australian one probably not. Just that behind that philanthropy there’s some ugly stories, aren’t there? But still, there is. But I I went to the The Rockefellas weren’t very good to their workers and they’d shoot people you know what I So they build a library in Pittsburgh and we can forgive them for their sins. Yeah, but still, I spent two or three weeks in the States working with, learning from a group called the Centre for Social Entrepreneurs.

They work across America and in each place they work with not for profit organisations who are housing, feeding people on the street, setting up schools, a whole range, you name it, they did it, including art galleries and all sorts of things. And they link someone who’s been very successful in business into working with these people to help them to focus the way that they operate and become more effective. And they put their own money in to do this as And it became really apparent to me that there was a whole culture there which says you get from society, you give back. Society, you’ve been made rich from society, you contributed back. And more than one said, look, why should my kids have all of this that I’ve taken from society?

It’s got to be spread more broadly, which is what Bill Gates forgets there is a very strong theme. In Australia, it doesn’t exist. Well, is some. There’s few, can probably The Maya Foundation, there’s a few. Well, it’s trying to conceive of an economic system that’s not run by greed, I suppose.

Yeah, that is run by compulsion. I guess that’s where I ended up when I was trying to think through some of that. I think I was making that the and I made this argument a few times last week and the week before that postmodern society could be understood as the three poisonous minds become institutional ized outside of us and then come back towards us. It appears to me as though capitalism is a sort of an institutionalization of not having enough, of greed actually. So to undermine capitalism is not just an external struggle, it’s actually an internal and external one.

The capitalist projects can only be undermined if they’re sort of a critical mass of individuals that have got past their own internal greed. That seems to me to be like the Marxist project of socially transforming capitalism through the proletarian struggle was a really, really failed project. Do you think it also an integral part of capitalism in the West in particular is it’s not stated, but it’s the underlying idea of how individuality look out for yourself. Yourself and that sort of thing. Again, that’s the internal and the external, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. So Well, that’s again an artifact of, you know, the Western the Western Western knowledges that the individual as a concept has been conceived of by the Western tradition. Mean it’s always been there of course because the Buddha diagnoses it two and a half thousand years ago but the West actually brings that idea to a pinnacle under the notion of the sort of Cartesian subject. But an individual, you know, look out for myself, you know, my happiness is most important rather than feeling a connection to society.

I think that, you know, the Dalai Lama diagnoses that in his, in his, but you know, you’d have to say that, you know, American individualism individualism is perhaps the pinnacle of it, which we’re all under the influence of that idea. So it’s sort of rejecting individualism’s incredibly significant. But then again, you see this is where you’ve got intellectually at least it appears as though people are starting to get onto the notion of our interdependence. So you’ve got this alternative view of how we are actually existing which cuts across this notion of individualism. They’re both sort of living side by side.

One’s still dominating of course because we haven’t made sense of the sort of independence yet but there does seem to be an increasing This is the irony of telling you about this American professor. When he gives his presentations, in the end, they all rest on interdependence, which I find radically interesting. But I’m not sure where he gets the idea but all of his arguments fall over unless his whole notion of ethics and so on is based on this notion that we’re interdependent. Interesting if you go back to the stoics they emphasized quite a lot the idea of causes and effects and implicit in causes and effects as things being When did you study the Stoics? Oh, couple of months ago.

Oh, okay. No, started reading them a couple of months ago. Which ones are you reading? I’ve just been reading some Seneca. Seneca, And some general ideas.

Yeah. But some of the ideas are, it’s the similarity is amazing. At the, you know, the American conference where I was giving this paper on anger with a Cypriot friend of mine, we got into some conversations with people that were making the argument that there were Buddhists hanging around the, you know, the Roman and Greek courts and those those ideas of the stoics and Buddhist. But that’s not surprising, isn’t it? I thought when Alexander Alexander.

Write the right truth in India. In fact, it did I’m just looking for evidence of that actually. Buddha is supposed to be the first sculpture by the Greeks. Oh, right. Yeah.

So Greek is the one that actually put a picture on how Buddha looks like. Oh, okay. It’s come out of the Greek sculpture tradition. Alexander the Great wanted to bring that religion back to Greece, but Greeks at the time, every god’s got a face. So they have to put a face to To Buddha.

To bring it back to Greece. Mhmm. That’s very good. Yeah. So that’s why, you know, that’s this, you know, Cyprus story.

Lot of Yeah. Ideas arose at different places, you know, expressed in different terms because they’re coming out of different cultures, but the essence of the ideas, who knows? It doesn’t matter really if the ideas are good and useful. Yeah. I mean, that’s the the interesting thing for me at at current time, contemporary time, where where we can be very strongly attached to the the imagery, the iconography, the words of a particular culture, say Tibetan Buddhism, and at that time, get actually lost because we don’t understand the universality of the ideas, the concepts, and the the sources from from which they’ve come as well.

I think, personally, I think that’s something we’ve got to watch out for. I mean, just coming across some of these similarities recently myself, you know, that that’s been terrific in a way because you think, hang on. It doesn’t matter where where the idea is originated, but the essence of the idea is the same. And you can see there in our old tradition as well as in this tradition Yeah. That even gives them more strength to me.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. It does. I I wanna say at at the same time as I was going to say that what we do have though is in a tradition there’s a consistency which ties it together that if you start to pick it apart and take the bits only, the bits you like and the bits you don’t like, what you end up is Woman’s Weekly in Buddhism or, you know, whatever, can fall apart as well and we can lose all the benefit from this tradition which has struggled, you know, who held these sorts of discussions for thousands of years and come up with ideas which have been fed on and bred on and so on as well.

It’s a two edged sword, isn’t it? This sort of discussion has probably gone on ad infinitum. Yeah, well that’s right. That’s right. Every new culture moves into, there’s a process of adaption.

So, I mean, what we’re doing is nothing new. No, no. I mean, one of the things, of course, is that the West took so long. We were busy doing it. We were busy with the concrete of world.

Well maybe, maybe, I mean where we were five minutes ago, Buddhists had already informed the Greeks and the West arises out of Greek philosophy anyway, so perhaps we’ll just come back to it again. I think at Dalai Lama, it’s probably wearing two heads. One is head of state of Tibet, obviously, autonomy in Tibet. But secondly, as the the demonstration of Bodhisattva, it’s because China invaded Tibet that the Mahāyāna Tibetan Mahāyāna religion spread out this spread in the world. Spread to of the world.

Yeah. So, you know, absolutely civil and army wanna clown, but, you know, if China hadn’t invaded Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism would still stay only in Tibet and probably only the Zen from Japan to California. That probably would go up, but, you know, the Well, we’d have we’d have, you know, Evans vents and, you know, texts like that, but not very many. Yeah. There were.

There was some Tibetan Buddhism available, but it’s now it’s, you know, sort of just unleashed, hasn’t it? Unleashed. Yeah. Completely unleashed. Yeah.

Yeah. Could all be in British museums. Yeah. That’s true. Well, you know, Tibetology.

Yeah. Tibetology. That’s right. I mean, it’s still around, of course. Drives me mad.

We’re gonna we’re gonna preserve it as an artifact, not as a not as a living knowledge. Yeah. And we’ll publish papers. And books and make our make our intellectual career. That’s right.

I mean, I’ve gotta be careful of that myself. I wasn’t having a go at you. No. No. But, you know, it’s it’s it’s out there.

It’s possible. Well, that’s all you know? That’s an all fields, though. That’s an all fields. I mean, you’re you’re think it’s yeah.

There’s a there’s a there’s a bit of that out bit that out there. Debbie, you’re very quiet through this. What’s going through your mind? Oh, I’m just listening. He and I have been having these conversations for years.

Mhmm. Things like a concept like compassion capitalism. I’m very suspicious of Compassionate capitalism. Well, no. It’s like democratic capitalism.

There’s a book called that too. Concepts that get dragged out to sound nice to justify another agenda, you know, I guess really. Well, I guess it’s one of the When it comes from within, say, a Buddhist tradition as well, you know, oh, I’m sorry, within a Buddhist institutional setting. That’s that’s where I have the most Okay. With it.

Not when you have the capitalist saying, we’re gonna create a capitalist, a compassionate capital ground, but when we find people within Buddhist traditions looking at and laying out how to work within that for success, know, and so on. The bit of difficulty finding a justification for what we’re already doing, is that what you’re saying? Well it may be, I don’t know. I’m just suspicious that it’s very easy to build up justification. Well it’s one of the things that disturbs me most about the New Age is the religious It’s rational.

Justifications for capitalist behavior. Well, there’s no I mean, in the discourses of the Buddha, talked about compassion and capitalism as in not dealing in killing of pigs and not dealing in arms and not dealing in intoxicants. So as long as they are not in those kind of business That’s that’s not necessarily capitalism. That’s compassion. Compassion, but they are in a certain business.

So if they are in a certain business that I guess that’s where my problem with the word capitalism is you see. Been economic systems forever. Where does capitalism start and end as a concept and where do you put the limits on it? So I guess guess for Rating people’s needs and then fulfilling them. Well I guess for Marx, capitalism emerges with the industrial revolution.

We go from sort of feudal forms of exchange to a much more sort of organised, institutionalised If you look at the Shinto Zen in Japan for instance, going back in nineteenth century, a lot of the monasteries are family business. Yeah. They have a bearing and the temple is passed on to the city and they pass on to grandchildren. It’s like a capitalist business. That’s not capitalism though, is it?

Well, it’s not That’s main, it’s linked to the economic relations of society. Just they live in spirituality. Oh yes. Maybe. You know what I mean?

Like, just for sort Capitalism, if we’re using it in a economic, political sense, has got a very specific meaning of the that we believe that. One of my things I found in travels in the UK was that I was amazed, even though, you know, I’ve heard about class society in the sense of Australia being a classless society, supposedly. In fact, when you’re travelling a place like that, you see these whole bunch of class just so clearly. This is in the UK? Oh yeah, no we don’t understand glass until you go there.

No, you know? So within that niche, there’s been a series I’ve been watching on Thursday nights at ten past six on the buildings that shaped Britain. No, not the archaeologists. This is a different one. There’s three academics or four academics who take you through the different stages and ages in Britain and look at what the buildings say about the society at the time We visited a place called Fountains Abbey which is a massive abbey, four hundred monks in there and it was falling apart, it fell apart and we thought gee what happened here?

Happened to the religion suddenly this thriving abbey would fall apart? Now this programme explained it fell apart because Henry VIII, it had been up for forty years and in that time it amassed enormous wealth because people paid their taxes to the abbey. The abbey employed them to feed the four hundred monks, they took a tax, all this sort of stuff on one thing. Henry VIII determined the church had too much, what with the split Catholicism and Church of And he actually destroyed the abbeys and this was one. And they went in and they took out the windows, they took out the wood, they took the slate off the roof, they took everything and used it to he gave that to the lords which he established around the place to build their castles.

And it was a political move to destroy the power of the Catholic And to empower those who would support the Church of England. And I think that there’s always been very dense relationships between the ruling classes in any society and the religious traditions and Japan. In Kyoto, I went to lots of shrines there and they were mostly built by some shogun. Oh, A bit religious. In the past, it’s really the domain of the rich.

It’s just what they like the Brahmins, they had the rich people in India. Even you go back to with the church, obviously, got very rich until Martin Luther King tried to bring it down to the poor. So, yeah, it’s I mean, religion is a domain of the rich. It’s only the rich and the privilege that’s got access to God or close to God. Or is it just the way the rich misuse religion?

I mean, there’s that Well, it’s a perfect way to seize power. Because, you know if you come back to the, you know, there’s the Dalai Lama two and a half thousand years after Buddha arguing for trying to live contented life outside of, you know, materialistic Yeah. All those things about the OEs, you know, the centers of power, I mean, it’s all that stuff, isn’t it? You know, what Rob’s been talking about, is the in here stuff, and that’s that connection. And I I think, you know, when we often talk about religion, that’s really the institutional Yeah.

Yeah. Religion, which is not to me the essence of what it’s all about. Well, spirituality. Yeah. It’s about organizations seeking to preserve themselves very Yes.

There’s really nice version of distinguishing between those two in a who was it? It’s in a Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem. You start studying one small group of philosophers and you end up studying all of them. So, the Frankfurt School, one of the key philosophers in that school was a guy called Walter Benjamin who was one of the things that he was, that he’s still incredibly significant now. He died on the border of France and Spain in nineteen forty one because he thought he was about to be given up to the Nazis and he was a Jewish German guy so he committed suicide with Hannah Arendt was in his party.

Was an incredibly amazing story. Anyway, one of Benjamin’s, what he’s most famous for is putting together Marxism and Judaism as a form of analytic for the times which is quite amazing stuff because he was able to use Judaic tradition’s view of human being because Freud’s only just beginning and Marxist notions about the social. So putting the personal and the social together in incredibly powerful forms of critique. Anyway, because of his Judaism then, he’s friends with this Judaic scholar called Gershom Scholem who’s already living in Jerusalem and trying to get Benjamin to come and live with him but never ever does. Anyway, sorry about that old story.

Shalom wrote this book about the Kabbalah, the Kabbalistic part of the sort of Jewish tradition. And in the opening chapter, makes an argument that religious traditions invariably involve two conflicting imperatives. One’s the mystical, which always begins with the experience of the individual who starts it. So you get this mystical experience of reality. But then to reproduce that particular knowledge institutions build up around it.

And so what tends to happen is that without both of them then there’s no intergenerational reproduction. But if the mystical fades and dies or gets hidden in the basement then all you’re left with is the of dogma which is my experience of Western Christianity. The mystical experience wasn’t available to me when I went to church apart from listening to my mother sing which wasn’t really on the agenda. You’ve got to come to some strange, know, listen to some strange old Tibetan guy talk and get some instruction about how one could replicate a mystical experience in your mind that was, you know, liberatory. Very, very weird stuff.

Because you know every, if somebody has a mystical experience which is very agent of change for them. They report of it to us is just hearsay. Yeah. You know, cannot have the same impact, you know? I guess that’s where the where the I don’t know, it was one of the sort of really bizarre things that happened at that conference I was describing before when I went off to Japan and we were giving this, you know, Westerners giving Eastern philosophy Japan at philosopher’s conference.

Very, very bizarre stuff. Anyway, one of the people in the audience wanted us to explain how we were validating scientifically our personal experience. You just kind of looked at each other. Yeah, something like that. But in sort of Western educational, know, the Western educational canon, which I don’t know, say there’s a hundred years of journal articles trying to describe human experience as in terms of teaching and learning.

One of the narratives that I’m really, really interested in is the reflective practitioner. And there’s thousands, probably tens of thousands of accounts of people describing how they are reflective about their practice. And it’s possible that if you wanted to be a reflective practitioner you can validate your experience by locating your experience inside of this narrative of which there’s thousands and thousands of accounts to try and make sense of it and so Okay. So the woman who’s saying to me how do I validate my spiritual experiences? There’s a canon that’s two and a half thousand years old and that’s still extant that one can go to and cross reference what’s happening in one’s practice.

There’s practitioners that are still alive that one can go and talk to. What do they call the Tibetans? The technologists of the mind. Quite accurate maps that are that are actually available in text and alive that one can navigate one’s spiritual life. It’s a stupid question, I thought, but anyway, validate you.

You know? Interestingly, It was very unscientific, apparently. Of course. Just saying tradition started mystical experience and then around that builds an institution or whatever continuity. This is just an aside, but I’m just listening to the religion report on the ABC and always on Wednesday mornings, eight thirty, sometimes they have quite interesting stuff.

And there’s a this is the Catholic church, and I’m not knocking them or anything, but there’s a church in wasn’t it great yeah they’re about to they’re about to close it don’t they because of their aberrant behavior. And they’ve got a statue of the Buddha in the church. Yeah this is one of the things that was cited as being problematic. What struck me was how Don’t they practice Zen in the Vatican but that’s another story. How socially active they were doing all these sort of socially engaged things, drawing in people and so forth, you know all sounded incredibly positive and because they’ve changed the wording in their baptism a little bit you know, Rome is now coming down and saying, hang on.

Here we are. Just straying a bit far from the Yeah. From the line. Mhmm. And the archbishop is sort of threatening to close the church down.

But this gives them the dilemma. Here, they’ve got something that’s obviously meaningful to these people. It’s drawing people in and it’s meaningful for them, but they’ve just moved on a little bit from the official version. So if you shut them down, you actually cut down your own numbers institution, and they’re struggling. Know, Christianity is struggling anyway.

And yet, you sort of think it just sounds like what all these people are doing Yeah. Are so positive and so meaningful. It’s just this real tension in the in the situation between what is meaningful to people and what the official line is. There’s an official line in every tradition though, one can’t over romanticize the Tibetans. Thought it was a really good example of this tension of people wanting to move on and translate.

They weren’t doing anything really radical by the sound of it. I was quite surprised when I heard some of them talking, you know, what a big issue this was. There was chapter in this edited collection by a German philosopher that I got a hold of a few years ago by a German theologian called Metz, I think his name was. And he was trying to provide a, you know, to navigate through the problem you’re trying to describe. And the way that he put it was how do traditions translate themselves into the times?

He used the word contemporaneousness. He proposed two alternative views that were quite problematic. So on the one hand, the tradition just ignores the times completely and as far as he was concerned that was hopeless. So made no attempt at all to be contemporary. Which may be this circumstance.

Well, on the other hand, in your struggle to be contemporary you actually lose too much of the tradition. So you actually have a de traditional ising thesis that’s too radical and then again you get sort of lost. So somehow or other how does one struggle between those two extremes as know again as old as the religious traditions? So in this circumstance the Catholic church has a fear that in fact they’ve moved to become contemporaneous and to lose the link with the church. Well the traditions, the keepers of faith are, well, there’s been a reassertion of dogma in the Catholic church hasn’t there?

Ratzinger was the head of their inquisition before he was the Pope. The prefect of the community of the something of the faith. Oh, that’s right. That’s the title that they give to their inquisition. He excommunicated the liberation theologians in South America and so on and so on.

Oh yeah. So, the whole, the socially engaged, the most socially engaged elements of the Catholic church got done in under Ratzinger’s time. Which I found sort of quite ironical that the reason that I came to the, my whole thesis was as a consequence of the Paulo Freire who was probably the grandfather of liberation theology in South America. The liberation theologians were incredibly significant in my thinking. My own Western teachers were South African Anglicans involved in the anti apartheid struggle who were drawing great sustenance from Freire.

Again, that cross fertilization. And that’s sort of Christian Marxists. So you’ve got an attempt to bring into conversation a theory of society with a theory of the human being that’s quite hopeful and so on. I’m surprised that we haven’t seen any Buddhist Marxists because of the whole karma about dialectical materialism and karma cause and effect and so on. Think maybe there’s stuff.

Well my thesis is probably about as close as it got. Because in the end, of course, they come together on interdependence, I think. Anyway, the question that I sort of proposed near the end about how does one translate the, you know, Dalai Lama’s notion of universal compassion to post modern conditions. That probably the, you know, the problem that I’m still grappling with really. Think that’s the ongoing work.

It again, what’s the question? Do you translate the Buddhist idea of universal compassion in postmodern conditions? It’s easier, is it? Earlier, before postmodern conditions. Well, think in feudal times it probably was.

I think postmodern conditions are so complicated. Is postmodern conditions really the global environment problems you know? You’ve got globalization, you know, unleashed in the last, I don’t know, globalization probably goes with western colonization, doesn’t it? As soon as the west is colonizing everywhere, then you’ve got globalization. I think that’s a few years old now.

Neo liberal capitalism when when you know on the on the on the whim of a stock market you can bankrupt Thailand. I mean we’re living in very complicated times. When money, huge amount of money flows incredibly quickly and transnational, some transnational corporations are bigger than lots of countries and so that’s not that’s not like living in the Buddha’s time. I guess one of the things that, it’s probably novel or weird or not quite sure what the word is really but one of the, it’s sort of odd to be able to be asking the question of what does it mean to be Buddhist and being political at a time when one the sort of abiding characteristics of the times is political powerlessness. That’s part the condition.

I think it’s a really nice set of lectures that Charles Taylor gave a number of years ago called The Ethics of Authenticity. It was the Reith Lectures. I finished that book about two days ago. It’s a fantastic little book, isn’t it? You know, the opening move are the malaise of modernity, which are pretty good rendering of the times.

There’s individualism, technocratic rationality, so our reasoning’s become technicized. And efficiency, you know. Yeah. Well, no, the human disappears and we just have a technical concern. So, of the problems are technical.

They’re not actually social and human. Technical rationality leads to the concentration camp and so on. It was diagnosed by these western philosophers that I got interested in. Does sound like reality or anything? Well what happens of the way some of the philosophers that I like diagnose it is that under conditions of modernity, so you get the Western Scientific Revolution, you get separation of ethics from reasoning.

So science, the way that it conceives of knowledge separates ethics off. So ethics goes one way and reasoning goes another. So you end up in very weird places. Some argue that the way that you understand modernity is it’s a separation of ethics from reason and aesthetics. So pre the scientific revolution, in everyday life, what’s good, what’s true and what’s beautiful are all together in the common sense.

And under the conditions of Western modernity, those three go off in different directions. And there’s experts in those spaces. You visit the areas rather than live the whole lot. There’s all sorts of things concur from that. But anyway, third one is political powerlessness.

No, that’s an excellent book. Yeah, it’s fantastic, isn’t it? He’s a philosopher, he’s one of the things that’s interesting about Taylor is he’s a Christian. Oh okay. And it’s not that evident in that book but his most recent tome is an attempt to actually re engage the religious.

What is that the person you talked to me about? He was coming to Adelaide last year but didn’t come in the end because he was sick. There’s a guy, Wallace, there’s a professor of international studies here now, Liz Porter, whose husband was a student of Charles’. He was at, I think Charles Taylor’s at, it’s university in Montreal. And he won the international?

The Templeton He’s a brilliant philosopher. He wrote a really famous book called The Sources of Self. In one of the Mind Life series he’s invited into the room with the Dalai Lama and he gives this unbelievably concise jargon free description of the way that the Western self is being constituted over the last four or five hundred years. It’s fantastic. One of the ideas I found very interesting in just that book you were talking about was how the concept of individuality, you know, I’m an individual, da da da da, but not recognizing that my own idea of my individuality is constructed in dialogue with other people.

That’s right. That’s That’s right. It’s invisible. That’s right. So again there’s the idea of connection.

And the idea of Just from my perspective anyway having what I think sort of happened in Western philosophy is that the philosophers of the enlightenment, Descartes and so forth, what they did was they codified the illusion. So the reified I that the Buddha diagnoses as the problem which is constantly being reported to anyone who’s alive. With the discourses that were available at the time they really thought that was the real. Found something here. And they had the vocabulary to describe it and so on.

And of course that’s the way that it appears. So you’ve got the whole Western philosophical tradition and the scientific revolution all arising out of someone’s codification of the cosmic joke. It’s amazing isn’t it? And then Western philosophy for the last, I don’t know, maybe since Heidegger and Wittgenstein but certainly in the last fifty years there’s been various deconstructionists. That are, you know, western philosophies worked out that Descartes was definitely wrong.

Freud disproves it, you know. It goes on and on and on. Foucault, Derrida, that concept of the eye that Descartes codifies for the basis for Western reason has been sort of undermined within Western tradition. Is this the idea of the split between the mind and the body? That, no, no, no.

There’s just that the way that Descartes notion of the eye is that it is stable and it’s rationality’s perfectly available to itself and so on and so on. Where of course Freud says there’s an unconscious and half of it’s not and so on and so on. So there’s been various, you know, serious torpedoes at the, you know, the basic proposition and then, you know, the mind body split’s another one. Yeah, I’m not familiar enough with the Western tradition. Yeah.

Anyway, there’s, you know, I’ve been gathering up resources from the western tradition too where they at least can think about the fact that, you know, the the the eyes are delusion. Even though they they don’t quite go far enough, but where Charles is responsible for being able to provide a reading of how our views of self are historically constituted. They’re not natural in that sense. Which is, so not only is there and so on but it’s a, we understand ourselves literally through discourses that are available to us at the time. But it doesn’t appear like that, does it?

No. That’s the interesting part. Yeah. Yeah, so in the middle of all of that of course is the views of self. That’s what I got really interested in in my thesis I suppose.

The problem of the self for the Western tradition especially. The Buddha’s key insight. It’s a wonderful antidote. Wonderful antidote. But I don’t know, it’s one of the things that sort of mystifies me is the ignorance around the key idea in Buddhism in other traditions.

You would think the key idea would be understood at least. But no. It’s because we see it from in here. I don’t know. It’s just whether or not people’s minds are open or able to hear it.

Sorry, just can’t bend with the question. How would the question, would that affect the question doctor? It would be quite problematic for it, wouldn’t it? Yeah, so I probably can’t hear it. Now, what about in the Western secular tradition we’ve killed God?

So this shouldn’t be such a problem. But the Gnostics would have understood, wouldn’t they? Maybe. Yeah, I haven’t done enough work on the Yeah, the Christians certainly would have trouble with it. I don’t think they saw, I mean, think the ideal has been around.

Oh, yeah. I don’t think they, the one that carried it on to this logical conclusion, and they didn’t see the pragmatic value or the therapeutic value of doing that? No. It can be a liberty. Well, it’s a very scary idea, probably.

I mean, it’s conversations I’ve had with you, you know, when the teachers are describing emptiness, we should all be running from the room screaming. What do you mean I’m not there? The current question, in fundamentalist sectors, sex, the notion of the ‘I’ and the ‘I’ existing is absolutely central because it creates a personal relationship with God which exists also as another ‘I’. And it’s that relationship which gives the meaning to the whole at least that sector of religion. Whereas you look at, there are others, there are people like Freire and so on, and the theologians, he wasn’t a theologian really, he was medical but as far as theologians were there were, and there still are, a series of theologians who will argue very strongly about interdependence and the fact that there is separation from God at any time, not because of a closeness related by two eyes, but because God exists only in people through the and God only exists because of people, linked spirituality that’s there.

So there are seekers of Christian thought which will accept a very Buddhist viewpoint but it’s not part of doctrine and not part of the institutionalized church. Well you get the common sense about God in the public sphere is that it’s an old man. Of course you do, John Heston. Well, sorry, yeah. Of course it’s been given the face.

Of course it’s Charlton. When you’re listening to the respected Christian leaders, That version of God’s not sort of out there. No it’s not. It’s not. It doesn’t sell well.

It’s also because it’s not reassuring to most. Same as Buddhists we have difficulty understanding. As Christians, anybody who’s hearing that view also has difficulty understanding. And what the Christian tradition has only in very small bits is the contemplative and the meditative schools But in those schools they do come to terms with the non separation from what they call God as well I guess that’s where the sort of Jewish tradition is sort of interesting because you know strictly there’s no name for God and so on and so on. It’s much more to know an imponderable category.

Definable. Course. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. Well I thought Yahweh was his name.

Yeah well, when you have to give it a name. Yowie, I thought you had to look at the name Yahweh means something like the name which was all known. That’s right, that’s right. Anyway it’s a bit, gets you away from the personification and so on. Yeah.

Unfortunately the theological complexity of God wasn’t on offer again in the church I went to. No. But it was the liberation theologists who really started to question that as well, which they were picked out. I mean you got the Archbishop of Canterbury making statements in these sorts of lines as well. It doesn’t go down well.

And it’s only because the Archbishop of Canterbury is not able to be sacked by anybody else that he’s still there for Canterbury. Canterbury, yeah. Harking back to an earlier conversation when some of the mystical goes and you’re left with a dog and you’ve just got fear. Hell and damnation. As you, in Christianity, union with God.

Mhmm. And so it was very it was very liberative. Yeah. So it was it was these experiences that people were struggling to to have. It’s just making life comfortable whatever way you can.

Yeah. You’re back to spiritual materialism. Your ego becomes your spiritual adviser. I guess that’s why, you know, I I was having a little joke with myself earlier saying that, you know, it took me years to work out that that, you know, shifting your motivation was the key point. I’m still not totally convinced I’ve actually worked out what, you know, the dharma really is actually because there’s some easy versions of it that I feel quite comfortable with but I don’t think it’s actually supposed to be quite like that.

Do you know what I mean? So how you actually get to experience the dharma I think is a serious question. I think the problem is you read too many books. I’ve been told that before.