Is it finally time for the meek to inherit The Earth?

A Place To Begin

The truth is that no matter how enlightened and thoughtful we think we are, we are consistently blinded by our own personal delusions.  As much as we may believe we are objective, in reality the moment we commit ourselves to a cause we find it hard to accept an opposite point of view. We excuse our discomfort with a homeless person by saddling her or him with a character flaw. She must be addicted or he is just lazy. It’s a normal response, part of the human tendency to try to define ourselves by seeing how different we are from someone else. But the truth is that any position we take will be flawed just as any position someone else takes will have its merits. And when we are honest with ourselves we realize that each of us is only a misstep or two away from being the homelessness we are so quick to judge. At the core of our delusion is the belief that our lives are solely our own creations and not in large part, the chance circumstance of a multitude of causes and conditions.  


It is the rare person who can stand aside from the delusion of being a personally created and maintained self. The person is doubly rare if she or he doesn’t collapse into despair at the thought of a loss of a clearly defined, consistent self and instead embraces the freedom of knowing the self is always changing in dynamic interaction with numerous emerging causes and conditions.


The first such person of record was Prince Siddhartha who, after many years of dedicated practice, discovered the true contingent nature of the deluded mind and with that realization became a Buddha—an Enlightened One.

 Prince Siddhartha had begun struggling with the problem of the deluded mind while still living in his father’s home. He had begun to find that the old roles and rules were no longer satisfying and nothing seemed to emerge from his life of privilege that sated his yearning to make sense of his existence. The story goes that his life reached a crisis point just as he was approaching 30. As we know the 30’s are a time when there is a need to feel settled and focused on one’s life work. The sense of discontent often increases as one gets closer to that age. And individuals often feel compelled to radical action if a life’s path hasn’t come into focus. That is what seems to have happened to Siddhartha. So when he saw the sick man, the elderly man, the corpse and the mendicant he was primed to be deeply moved by the sudden awareness that no matter who we were, we were all walking the same painful path toward annihilation. 


We can presume that this sudden awareness brought him to a choice point. He could retreat back into delusion and finish his life filled with sensual distractions, ignoring that the reality that his life would inevitably end but likely not before the self he had known had disappeared into old age and the sense of who he was had been challenged by immense suffering. 


Or, he could instead join the ranks of the spiritual mendicants who had chosen to renounce the sensual world. These renouncers were developing practices that they hoped would help them discern meaning in a world that seemed to be filled with meaningless suffering and pain. 


So when he decided to leave his father’s grand home and his family in 563 BCE he was 29. He spent the next seven years immersed in the practices of the day searching to understand the meaning of the suffering he knew was an integral part of existence. He would discover on the morning of his enlightenment that the cause of suffering was that all phenomena are contingent and that suffering arises when we refuse to accept the inherent contingency of phenomena and the necessary impermanence of all things.


He spent the next forty years in a small area of Southern Nepal and Northern India sharing his practice and his teachings. He would never know that when he had stepped out the door of his father’s house he had stepped right into the middle of the Axial Age—a term coined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the time in history when all the world’s modern religious traditions,  including Buddhism,  were emerging.  It was a time Karen Armstrong, the religious historian reminds us, that the great empires were in disarray and violence and strife were rampant. Seth Abrutyn, a sociology professor at the University of Memphis describes the social conditions that the Axial Sages (The Buddha among many others) tapped into, as being  “.... a reservoir of hopelessness despair and anger driven by a widening gap between the rich and the poor, the reduction in social distance wrought by massive urbanization and population density, and the growing abyss between the political center and the everyday lives of people.”


It is as apt a description of the world we live in today as it is of the world as it was 2600 years ago. Strip away the trappings that masquerade as progress and the world is still awash in the suffering created by our delusion that we have non-contingent selves and that our welfare can exist independent of the welfare of all .


The Buddha would feel right at home in our times. The interest in his teachings and his practices, as evidenced by the number of current books and articles relating his work to our own suffering world, suggests that his wisdom is as relevant as ever. 


But relevance is only a part of what is necessary. For his wisdom to be embodied by a society it must also have resonance. And in a world where security and well-being are seen to come mostly to those who possess the means to exert power and control it is hard to see how the Buddha’s practices of selflessness, loving kindness, resonate joy, compassion and equanimity can resonate. 


Scholars who have examined the Axial Period have developed some theories about why these ideas which were common to all the Axial Sages resonated so profoundly in their societies. Certainly the societies were not universally accepting of these messages of selflessness, love, kindness, compassion and peace. Yet enough people could step outside their familiar frameworks to accept this new way of seeing themselves and their world.  How that happened is an important question to answer if we, as Engaged Buddhists,  hope to bring the Buddha’s practices into the modern consciousness—not as an interesting idea but as a profound change in our very way of being.


Over the next year we will explore this question in the blog. We will cover a diverse range of topics from the potential for change that exists amidst great chaos and the surprising kindnesses that emerge during times of extreme violence. We intend to people the blog with the stories of real persons who have stepped away from their expected behaviour and taken care of others in surprisingly selfless ways. In the Christian faith these are the true “Meek” who Christ has said are destined to inherit the earth. They are the Bodhisattvas who are willing to sacrifice their own well-being because they are committed to leaving no one behind. 


With Gratitude
Frank