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Bhikkhu
Bodhi was born in New York City in 1944. He received a
B.A. in philosophy from Brooklyn College (1966) and a
Ph.D. in philosophy from Claremont Graduate School (1972).
In late 1972 he went to Sri Lanka, where he was ordained
as a Buddhist monk under the late Ven. Balangoda Ananda
Matreya Mahanyaka Thera. Since 1984 he has been editor
of the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, and since
1988 its president. He is the author, translator, and
editor of many books on Theravada Buddhism. He is also
a member of the World Academy of Art and Science.
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Over the past
three decades the world has been dramatically transformed in ways
that none but a handful of prophets and visionaries could have
foreseen even a hundred years ago. From a multitude of loosely
connected nation-states it has quickly evolved into a tightly
knit global community linked together by rapid means of transportation
and instantaneous media of communication. Old barriers of space
and time have dropped away, confronting us with new vistas of
self-understanding and forcing us to recognize the hard truth
that we all face a common human destiny. The claims to special
privilege of a particular people, nation, race, or religion now
sound hollow. As occupants of the same planet — a bright
blue jewel suspended in the frigid blackness of infinite space
— we either flourish together or perish together. In the
long run between these two alternatives no middle ground is feasible.
But while
our proud technology has enabled us to split the atom and unscramble
genetic codes, the daily newspapers remind us that our mastery
over the external world has not ushered in the utopia that we
had so confidently anticipated. To the contrary, the shrinking
of global boundaries has given rise to fresh problems of enormous
scope — social, political, and psychological problems so
grave that they throw into question the continued survival of
our planet and our race. The problems that challenge the global
community today are legion. They include the depletion of the
earth's natural resources and the despoliation of the environment;
regional tensions of ethnic and religious character; the continuing
spread of nuclear weapons; disregard for human rights; the widening
gap between the rich and the poor. While such problems have
been extensively discussed from social, political, and economic
points of view, they also cry out for critical examination from
a religious viewpoint as well.
A spiritually
sensitive mind would not look upon these problems as isolated
phenomena to be treated by piecemeal solutions, but would insist
on probing into unexplored areas for hidden roots and subtle
interconnections. From such a perspective, what is most striking
when we reflect upon our global ailments as a whole is their
essentially symptomatic character. Beneath their outward diversity
they appear to be so many manifestations of a common root, of
a deep and hidden spiritual malignancy infecting our social
organism. This common root might be briefly characterized as
a stubborn insistence on placing short-term, narrowly considered
self-interests (including the interests of the limited social
or ethnic groups to which we happen to belong) above the long-range,
vital good of the broader human community. The multitude of
social ills that assail us cannot be adequately accounted for
without bringing into view the powerful human drives that lie
behind them. And what is distinctive about these drives is that
they derive from a pernicious distortion in the functioning
of the human mind which sends us blindly in pursuit of factional,
divisive, circumscribed ends even when such pursuits threaten
to be ultimately self-destructive.
The most
valuable contribution that the Buddha's teaching can make to
helping us resolve the great dilemmas facing us today is twofold:
first, its uncompromisingly realistic analysis of the psychological
springs of human suffering, and second, the ethically ennobling
discipline it proposes as the solution. The Buddha explains
that the hidden springs of human suffering, in both the personal
and social dimensions of our lives, consist of three mental
factors called the unwholesome roots. These three roots —
which may be regarded as the three prongs of the ego-consciousness
— are greed, hatred, and delusion. The aim of the Buddhist
spiritual path is to gradually subdue these three evil roots
by cultivating the mental factors that are directly opposed
to them. These are the three wholesome roots, namely: non-greed,
which is expressed as generosity, detachment, and contentment;
non-hatred, which becomes manifested as loving-kindness, compassion,
patience, and forgiveness; and non-delusion, which arises as
wisdom, insight, and understanding.
If we contemplate,
in the light of the Buddhist analysis, the dangers that hang
over us in our globalized world order, it will become clear
that they have assumed such precarious proportions due to the
unrestrained proliferation of greed, hatred, and delusion as
the basis of human conduct. It is not that these dark forces
of the mind were first awakened with the Industrial Revolution;
they have indeed been the deep springs of so much suffering
and destructiveness since time immemorial. But the one-sided
development of humankind — the development of outward control
over nature, coupled with the almost complete neglect of any
attempts to achieve self-understanding — has today given
the unwholesome roots an awesome, unprecedented power that veers
ever closer to the catastrophic.
Through
the prevalence of greed the world has become transformed into
a global marketplace where human beings are reduced to the status
of consumers, even commodities, and where materialistic desires
are provoked at volatile intensities. Through the prevalence
of hatred, which is often kindled by competing interests governed
by greed, national and ethnic differences become the breeding
ground of suspicion and enmity, exploding in violence and destruction,
in cruelty and brutality, in endless cycles of revenge. Delusion
sustains the other two unwholesome roots by giving rise to false
beliefs, dogmatic views, and philosophical ideologies devised
in order to promote and justify patterns of conduct motivated
by greed and hatred.
In the new
era marked by the triumph of the free-market economy the most
pernicious delusion that hangs over us is the belief that the
path to human fulfilment lies in the satisfaction of artificially
induced desires. Such a project can only provoke more and more
greed leading to more and more reckless degrees of selfishness,
and from the clash of self-seeking factions, the result will
necessarily be strife and violence. If there is any validity
in the Buddhist diagnosis of the human situation, the task incumbent
on humankind today is clear. The entire drive of contemporary
civilization has been towards the conquest and mastery of the
external world. Science probes ever more deeply into the hidden
secrets of matter and life, while technology and industry join
hands to harness the discoveries of science for their practical
applications. No doubt science and technology have made appreciable
contributions towards alleviating human misery and have vastly
improved the quality of our lives. Yet because the human mind,
the ultimate agent behind all the monumental achievements of
science, has pitifully neglected itself, our patterns of perception,
motivations, and drives still move in the same dark channels
in which they moved in earlier centuries — the channels
of greed, hatred, and delusion — only now equipped with
more powerful instruments of destruction.
As long
as we continue to shirk the task of turning our attention within,
towards the understanding and mastery of our own minds, our
impressive accomplishments in the external sphere will fail
to yield their proper fruits. While at one level they may make
life safer and more comfortable, at another they will spawn
baneful consequences of increasing severity and peril, even
despite our best intentions. For the human race to flourish
in the global age, and to live together happily and peacefully
on this shrinking planet, the inescapable challenge facing us
is that of coming to understand and transform ourselves.
It is here
that the Buddha's Teaching becomes especially timely, even for
those who are not prepared to embrace the full range of Buddhist
religious faith and philosophical doctrine. In its diagnosis
of greed, hatred, and delusion as the underlying causes of human
suffering, the Buddha-Dhamma enables us to see the hidden roots
of our private and collective predicaments. By defining a practical
path of training which helps us to remove what is harmful and
to foster the growth of what is beneficial, the Teaching offers
us an effective remedy for tackling the problems of the globe
in the one place where they are directly accessible to us: in
our own minds. Because it places the burden of responsibility
for our redemption on ourselves, calling for personal effort
and energetic application to the taming of the mind, the Buddha's
Teaching will inevitably have a bitter edge. But by providing
an acute diagnosis of our illness and a precise path to deliverance,
it also offers us in this global era an elevating message of
hope.
Revised:
Saturday, 29 March 1997.
BPS Newsletter - Cover Essay #34 (3rd Mailing, 1996)
