or ‘How Does Practising Dhamma Change the World?’
👈🏼 previous note, 07.01. What is Dhamma, and aDhamma?
Let’s get this right up front here. If Buddhism doesn’t answer certain metaphysical questions such as how my awakening would benefit others, then can I feel confident the practice (or such awakening) will contribute to solving the ‘problems’ I want to help with? The Honey Cake Sutta has it that the dhamma eliminates the cause of conflict in society.
But still I say ‘problems’ because it may be a cultural or conditioned perception (sanna) that there is anything ‘wrong’ with reality - when I think about it sometimes, it seems conceited and deluded to think I can or need to ‘fix’ reality. The only real agency I have is in treating my own suffering, with confidence (saddhā) that this is the most-meaningful way to help create a society where there is minimal suffering.
There is also the question of whether there is a difference between saving the world and solving all your problems1, and then the question of whether the world needs saving in the first place. If it does, perhaps it needs saving from us. Or, as I understand now from AN 10.95 , it is actually that we need saving from the world.
What I mean though, is that I have always felt a need to ‘save’ or ‘change’ the world ~ at least, for as long as I can remember ~ and it is only recently that I have started to wonder whether this ‘need’ is actually more like a desire, and a conceited one at that.
It has been helpful for me to begin considering whether it is conceited to think one needs to change the world? There are lots of doom-claims out there and it seems anthropogenic climate change is a real threat that may cause human extinction, but the worldly ways of averting this are not getting very far because we are demanding or expecting change without having first prioritised changing our own mind and heart.
Does changing that world, the fathom-long world, change the whole world, or a third? Shouldn’t we get our own house in order, apply the oxygen mask to ourselves? Buddha taught liberation from personal suffering as a means of alleviating collective suffering, by supporting the welfare of gods and humans.
Meanwhile, the pursuit of unprofitable questions creates a ‘wilderness of opinions’, which I suppose is the same as the thicket of views.
In that sutta though, AN 10.95, Uttiya asks the Buddha, ‘is the whole world saved, or half, or a third’ by the teachings. But the Buddha’s core preoccupation is the cessation of suffering, not the sort of metaphysical enquiry proposed by Uttiya. So the Buddha doesn’t answer, and Ānanda uses the simile of the citadel to finish the teaching, one I don’t quite understand yet - except he explains that we don’t need to save the world, but to save ourselves from the world.
Because I don’t really know what to make of this, it hasn’t really put a dent in my belief that I need to be socially engaged for my practice to benefit others. It is one thing to transform my own mind, and of course, we all know that
our problems can’t be solved with the sort of thinking that caused them,
but how does Buddhism transform our thinking? By transcending dualist and rational thought through transpersonal experience? I hope so, and I believe so. If I am going to be socially engaged, I want to at least be in the process of transforming my own thoughts.
If Buddhism is going to transform the world, it needs to begin with transforming our thinking. Capriles and others make the convincing case along with Buddha that ‘ignorance’ (avijja) is the whole cause of ‘evil in our ordinary condition’, suggesting that by transcending this ordinary condition we become agents of the wholesome, not evil. In this way we serve the world, but maybe we don’t need to save it. And yet we treat suffering in society by going direct to the source - our own experience and, ideally cessation, of suffering caused by ignorance.
The cosmology of Buddhism suggests that the one-world we know (this Earth, on this current timeline, with all its history and evolution) is just one-world-of-many among innumerable and beginningless world-systems in boundless space. It could be said, from this panoramic perspective, that we do in fact have a planet B - or, rather, we have so many planets that no alphabet could contain a representation of their abundance.
I have some research to do because I understand Buddha taught in various places that the ultimate service we can perform is our own liberation, but I am not clear on where he taught this, and what I think of these teachings beyond my willingness to treat them with saddhā.
Meanwhile, I understand I need to undergo considerable training before I can help in the way the dhamma was intended, so if I am not currently active in service that is because I am in training ~ a kind of logic that would make sense to any medical student, and which I would like to embrace to support faith in my practice.
Footnotes
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mind being the forerunner of all states ↩