Hi Everybody,
Well I'm back from the brilliant light and the blue skies and the even bluer sea and the crisp croissants from the little boulangerie on the corner and the fishing from the rocks in the evening sunlight and the windsurfing and the...we had such a great holiday in Antibes, just having loving time together really after being so busy here at home. But it's great to be back too. I love the greenness of Kew with all the roadside trees and the scruffiness of the little village that sits around the station. Could I put a book on your summer reading list that really gets you thinking about your values and how you live your life. Its The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris, philosopher and neuroscientist. Not a new book but an utterly brilliant one that argues basically that the basis for our moral choices has to be the extent to which they create well-being in society. Which is not a million miles away from the teachings of Shakyamuni and Nichiren, that the basis for our behaviour in society, and the greatest cause for our own well-being indeed, should be the extent to which we create value for others.
So where were we? We were in the middle of Chapter 12 which realy serves to pull together some of the main threads of the book, and we've reached a section which is sub-titled, the greatest challenge.
' Much of the dailyness of our Buddhist practice is inevitably focused on helping us as indviduals to understand our own lives and to develop good strong, productive relationships within a relatively close environment of family and friends and colleagues. Inevitably. Those are the relationships that have by far the biggest influence on our lives. And as we all know, maintaining harmonious and productive relationships even within this relatively narrow environment takes considerable energy and effort.
But that having been said, perhaps the greatest challenge facing all of us as individuals, is learning how to extend this understanding, this compassion that the practice helps us to develop and to keep fresh and alive, out beyond the inner circle of friends and colleagues and work mates, out beyond our own community and our own society, to embrace all of humankind. That's a very big ask isn't it? And at first glance it may well seem like...well just a bunch of words. They may express what we would like to hear, but are they little more than wishful thinking? Little more than a thin pious hope? The history of man's inhumanity to man is so devastating that it can drive out the hope that such a change can ever be achieved.
But Buddhism is by no means alone these days in presenting this challenge to us. There is a growing body of opinion that such a vision is not only immensely, morally desirable, but a profound necessity for the future well-being of all of us, more interdependent now than ever before in human history. Let's go back to the American economist Jeffrey Sachs again, with his passionate argument for looking at the world through the lens of our common humanity;
' Most importantly, ' he writes, ' for us on this crowded planet, facing the challenge of living side by side as never before, and facing a common ecological challenge that has never been upon us in human history until now, the way of solving problems requires one fundamental change. A big one. And that is learning that the challenges of our gneration are not us versus them...they are us, all of us together on this planet, against a set of shared and increasingly urgent problems.'
All of us together on this planet...learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. It is a powerful vision, and most ordinary human beings would willingly subscribe to it. We desperately want the resolution that Jeffrey Sachs describes for us. People of all cultures and of all religions, Jew and Arab and Sunni and shia and catholic and Protestant and Hindu and Buddhist, living side by side... not necessarily in complete harmony, because history tells us that there are deep rifts in belief that may never be completely healed...but at least peacefully and sustainably.
But most ordinary human beings, describing themselves as realists, believe that to be an unattainable ideal, and in any case there doesn't seem to be any path along which it can be achieved. One of Buddhism's greatest services to humanity I suggest, is that it simply refuses to accept that interpretation of reality. Buddhism reminds us every single day, that however difficult the path, it starts right here for each one of us, at our own feet, and we can start to move along it whenever we choose. It involves coming to understand that we are not powerless, and that we can start out by seeking to have a beneficial influence upon our own environment, the little sphere within which we live and work. The key thing is making a personal determination that we wish to make a difference.
Buddhism asks us to make that determination every single day. '
That's it for today.
It's good to be back.
hope to see you again next time.
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available from Amazon and as a download on Kindle
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