In the video for the launch of Mike Slott's book, Mindful Solidarity, there's a mention that the Pali Canon does not have discussions of politics in relation to suffering. This would seem to leave us with little guidance drawn directly from early Buddhist teachings on ways to deal with the suffering caused by concepts developed on a grand scale, whether impacting groups or individuals. This is, I think, an excellent starting point, a seed for considering what insights the Buddha of the Pali Canon did provide about politics and the effects of social programming on the processes that are fundamental causes of dukkha.
And he did give us some pointers, though as is usually the case with the Buddha's talks, the commentary is not direct, but subtle. It was not his style to point fingers, to criticize harshly, or to call loudly for change. Instead, he provided us with information we can use to see for ourselves where the causes of our problems lie.
It is true that, as Mike points out in the beginning of the video, Buddhism addresses the dukkha that is within our control, but beyond that, there are causes of suffering that are larger — political, social — that come from outside us and are so large they aren't within our control. All we can do within a Buddhist practice is work on our reaction to these forces. This can and often does create a calmer environment for us and those we deal with that allows us to better use our energy to make better choices and be more effective in encouraging change that fosters flourishing for all.
Mention is made of the many Buddhists whose practice is apparently entirely focused on reducing their own suffering. We can also imagine that some may notice that reducing one's own dukkha has the effect of reducing the same for those nearby as well, yet this is still limiting the concerns of practice to one's own personal circle. Participants in the book launch gathering seemed to agree (as do I) that this makes for a fairly selfish form of Buddhism. Which is the antithesis of what the Buddha was trying to get across to us: selflessness. I bet we'd also all agree that this sort of practice is a very common starting place, one that often evolves into a deeper, broader practice, so we're not saying there's anything wrong with it, though we'll hope the evolution does take place.
The central question being asked, though, is: If the idea is a practice that broadens to take on large issues that affect all of us so that we see a need to address the large scale social factors and work for change there, what can we do when an individual has so little power to affect forces outside us?
I also wonder: did the Buddha discuss politics and social forces as causes of dukkha at all? After some consideration, I believe he did.
The Buddha’s Teaching Method
The problem I find with the Buddha's talks is that his chosen method of teaching was to point out what we need to see to understand what's actually happening. In a sense, he shows rather than tells. He draws a picture of things we can understand and in doing so suggests, "It's like that." Not "It is that," but "It's like that." We're asked to think about it and see if we can see for ourselves something "like that." Like dukkha as a second dart. Like the self as a fire fueled by grass, or wood, or oil. He talks about nutriment but really wants us to understand we feed and thereby keep alive and shape what passes for a permanent self.
As I see it, because of that teaching method we have missed some of the point of his lessons, in part because we mistake (as Buddhists often say) the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. We have taken some of his metaphors literally, which doesn't just cause confusion, it obscures the depth of the lesson.
The reason for this article is to point out a relevant example of this that I believe we've missed, in which the Buddha is talking about the effect social forces have on us, along with discussions of where that effect leads: to a specific form of dukkha, which he named as "quarrels and disputes" in one of his earliest talks on dependent arising (Sn 4.11). Or, in a longer riff on the subject, as "the taking up of stick and sword, quarrels, disputes, arguments, strife, abuse, lying and other evil, unskilled states" (in Walshe's translation from DN 15).
The Buddha on Dependent Arising
That example is dependent arising ("DA" for short), which is my specialty, as perhaps some of you may already know. I won't, here, provide the citations and research and reasoning used to arrive at a fresh understanding of this, his core lesson. Instead, I'm going to clarify what he was saying in his indirect way of pointing out a pattern and hoping we'll see, in this case, that social forces were then, as they still are now, a part of the problem. Then we can talk about what he did about them.
Basically, though DA has long been thought to be all about how our clinging to, well, whatever (sexual lust, greed, hatred, views) causes cyclic rebirth in the realm of suffering — samsara — when that understanding of what DA is about is actually just the finger pointing at the moon. The mistaken focus on DA as a discussion of how to escape rebirth by reducing clinging and craving for worldly things has caused us to miss its deepest points about how our natural instincts along with social forces have us, in our ignorance, shaping what we believe is a lasting self which is unaffected by such forces.
The words he chose to represent each of the twelve links do tell a story about rebirth, but the intended lesson is not about literal rebirth. The cycle described at the level of the names of the links is the finger pointing to the moon of our self-creation.
It begins in the first five links with the Vedic myth of creation -- how the atman, the eternal, separate self, is created -- meant to call to the minds of his audience through the parallel of similar patterns, how we create a self that was then mistaken for atman, or for any version of an eternal, separate, or even just lasting self. The next (middle) section of DA has named links that suggest the rituals that were used to maintain and modify that supposed atman. Unlike the early and ending links, in this one case he gives literal descriptions of what we do that parallel those rituals: our habits of thought. The final links of DA are named in a way that -- with the exception of the last link -- describe the expected outcome of those rituals: an eventual rebirth. Those in his audience following the named-link level of the story would expect that last link to be all about bliss, perhaps in an easy and pleasant rebirth, or in union with Brahman. But it's in this last link that the Buddha delivers his sharpest point: all that creating of a self, all the rituals we do to maintain and modify it, don't lead to bliss, they lead to more dukkha.
Social Constructions and Dependent Arising
If we think about this for a moment, we might see that he's not just pointing out the way our habits of thought — all that craving and clinging, to sensuality and views (kāma and diṭṭhi) — lead to problems, but that the name-level cycle of myth and ritual and life after death, as well as the literal forces of self-making are couched within socially-constructed belief systems. In his time that Vedic myth of creation that was the basis for the rituals was also an example of a foundational condition. Such foundational conditions are a basis for all that happens in the chain of dependent arising. Many of these foundational conditions that surround us as we go about our lives, ignorantly creating and continuously shaping our identities, are socially constructed, as is the one the Buddha uses as an example in the name-level links of DA: the myths that underpinned Vedic rituals about rebirth.
In our time the beliefs are not exactly the same as they were then. For example, we may think in terms of the soul God gave us; or who we are and have always been and we'll never change; or even who someone else is, given their nationality, sexuality, religion, or race. Yet his points about the way we create the self follow the same pattern, even if the end product takes different forms.
Thinking about the Buddha's talks as a whole, it's clear he put a lot of emphasis on the way we cling to views. For example, right view is usually first on the eightfold path, and whole talks cover variations on the possible wrong views in his time (I'm sure we've added more). Those views can easily be seen in his stories as rarely unique to an individual: they were socially constructed then, as they are now.
The Buddha’s Solution: A Correct Understanding of the Self
As to what he had to say about how we deal with those social forces, I'm sorry that I haven't found him coming up with as powerful a solution there as he has with his lessons on how we deal with the dukkha-making that is within our control. His answer does seem to be: work on yourself; teach others; argue as little as possible.
The way I see this is that, by demonstrating the cure as simply practice of the dharma, he's pointing out how monumental the social-level problem was even in his day. They had politics, wars over territory, many arguments over views. If there is a better way to take on the mega-level conditions, I can't imagine anyone more likely to come up with that one single powerful answer than the Buddha. But as far as I can see, he didn't find one to address social and political scaled conditions.
Yet I do think there's more: there's hope even in just what he's given us. The ignorance that is the first link of DA is ignorance of how we create the self we mistake for something more magnificent than it actually is, and how that leads to dukkha. The cure is knowledge, knowledge the Buddha tried his best to convey to us in DA and throughout his talks. The same process that creates that misunderstood self in us is what has created all the huge suffering-making forces that are so far beyond the control of any one person these days: racism is a created idea as are all prejudices. Nations that go to war over territory, religions that persecute each other, the supposed differences between "Venus and Mars" that are believed to cause so much heartbreak: all are human-made divisions for the same reasons we make a self. We create these huge golems out of outsized, shared concepts about the differences between groups of humans. They are just golem-selves we as a society have inadvertently created in our ignorance.
It may be -- I sure hope -- that if we can see more accurately not only how we create a self within us, but how we construct and feed those golems we imagine will serve and protect our group, that are capable of growing out of control and doing great harm, then that knowledge may eventually set humankind free, by providing the insights we need to break even that huge chain of events.
Linda Blanchard discovered Buddhism in a Whole Earth Catalog back in the mid-80s, and began meditating and trying to understand its principles through nothing but books. When she encountered a group in her town a decade or so later, the Buddha's teachings became clearer, and she's dug in deeper ever since. She's studied Pali under Richard Gombrich, and published a few papers in his Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Currently she's detailing her thesis on Dependent Arising over on Bluesky in her Skeptical Buddhism account.
