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.
10 Replies to “The Buddha Comments on Politics”
Dear Linda, I’m afraid I don’t understand your article here, or that I’m reading at a less knowledgeable level about Buddhism. I thought that Mike Slott proposed in Mindful Solidarity that the systemic social and political forces that generate suffering in our worlds—for example, racism and fascism—can be addressed through engaged secular dharma practice. I suppose that in the most personal sense, I think of the Buddha’s teachings on politics as being linked to those discourses when he directs us to follow “the wise.” There are a handful of wise teachers I turn to about politics—in my case, these include for instance Winton Higgins and the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, among others. I expect others have other wise teachers whose understandings they explore and follow. My point is that it’s my responsibility to discover who are “the wise” in my world and to follow their wisdom, to inform myself with their wisdom. I’m confident about this and feel that it’s integral to practicing secular dharma.
Hi Anne-Laure. I haven’t gotten that far in Mindful Solidarity, but I would agree with Mike that one tool we have is dharma practice. I also strongly support choosing carefully who we associate with, i.e. “the wise”. I note that the Buddha, when asked how we tell if someone is wise, basically answered, “It takes a long time.” So you’re quite right, it’s our responsibility to figure it out, keeping in mind that the longer we know someone, the better our chances of making good choices in our friendships and mentors.
The two points I was making in the piece can be condensed down to these:
(1) The Buddha, in his subtle way, did suggest that part of what influences us (in our ignorance) was the social/political ideas we’re surrounded by. I could add, in support of why I say this, that he did this in dependent arising, in a way that seems to have been missed by the traditional lineages. He points to that influence by using the most common worldviews of the day, about ātman, as the underlying structure of that core lesson. He also points out social influence through his rejection of the many views on self. At least I haven’t heard much from traditional teachers about the Buddha pointing out how strong social influence is, though it’s there in the text. And, in my experience, many Buddhists who get far in their practice notice that influence for themselves.
(2) Toward the end of my article, I’m suggesting that the way we build a self out of those ideas about the way the world works is similar to the way not just our institutions, but the huge concepts that abound in the world today (one race being superior to others, one political point of view being right while all others are wrong, etc) also develop something like “a self.” I’m basically agreeing with Richard Dawkins, there, in his origination of “meme theory” but stating it a different way. I suspect that if future generations recognize the “selfhood” of the concepts that generate violence and war, we may find new ways to combat their influence.
Hope this helps make it clearer.
I agree that we need to find ways to address, and resist today’s socio-political forces and crises, and discovering the wise is very much part of this effort. As Winton Higgins says in this newsletter too, ‘We can’t avoid thinking about power’.
The tough part – as always – is finding the most appropriate and effective ways to engage, to act. We can find wisdom and activism in many places. For me, local activist groups are essential, even though impermanent, as well as thinkers like Simone Weil and Thanissara.
Thanks for your thoughts on this, Suzanne. Local activism as in the No Kings protests and the upcoming rallies on the Fourth are wonderful, as is contacting our representatives in Congress. It’s hard not to get discouraged given that all activists wish we could get past this swing backward faster than we are. But persistence wins.
In my wondering if we can reduce the power of the golems we’ve created in our institutions and hatred-generating concepts, I keep thinking about how often the Buddha points out that we feed on ideas, and through that “nutriment” create a self and sustain it. I keep thinking that starving the beastly concepts might be a useful focus. I suppose that, in a way, that’s what the protests do. Rather than offering the food of submission, we deny it our compliance, and then some.
Thank you Linda for this very thoughtful opening for discussion on the Buddha’s most profound insight we call Dependent Arising. My science/medicine background and early rejection of the Doctrinal Religions, and a curiosity about just about everything, led me into Zen about forty-five years ago. I wondered what it was that the Zen Masters were pointing at that could only be indirectly indicated by koans. It was probably twenty years later that I discovered, in Encyclopaedia Britannica of all things, the name of the discourse containing the Buddha’s thorough description to his assistant Ananda of his most profound insight we call Dependent Arising.
Linda, possibly like you, I was and am astonished as to why Dependent Arising doesn’t seem to be front and centre of ‘Buddhism’, especially in this modern science-based, cause-and-effect, world we live in today. The Buddha’s actual words to Ananda, and his ensuring that Ananda thoroughly understood the causal chain sequence relating to the origins of human suffering, as an example of this new way of thinking, by going from origins to outcomes and back from outcomes to origins, have been thoroughly ‘lost-in-translation’ by inserting this natural linear flow into a twelve-spoke Dharmachakra so-called cycle. Perhaps the flow in all dimensions of natural processes was squeezed into a cycle so that the Brahmans of the day could fit the Buddha’s insight into their particular understanding of the world … birth-aging-death-rebirth-aging-death-etc…. because atman is immortal.
Briefly, thinking of the context in which the young Buddha had had his great insight and understanding into how the world (universe) ‘works’, this was at the very early stages of what philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. Humanity, East and West, in retrospect appeared to have been waking up; beginning to appear to be thinking more deeply about existence. Some years before the Buddha was born Thales, the Father of Modern Science, through meticulous observation and measurement was able to accurately predict the Eclipse of the Sun (Mathematics and Astronomy), and is thought to have been the source of the famous Delphic Oracle advice of – Know thyself! (Psychology). Heraclitus, another Greek philosopher around the same time suggested that the world/universe was in constant flow; nothing was fixed and unchanging – One cannot step into the same river twice.
So, ’Buddhism’ was secular and very advanced in thinking right from the beginning.
Ric
I so strongly agree, Ric, that on first discovering that Dependent Arising is described as the essence of the dharma, I was astounded not just that I hadn’t heard about it enough for it to stand out, but when I dug into the explanations of the lesson there were so many conflicting interpretations that it was clear that it was not really understood much at all. Which, I suppose, explains why we don’t hear much about it. Can’t be out there talking about how essential it is when it can’t even be explained. (But I find it can be explained. I suppose if anyone’s interested and unfamiliar with my research, I could write here about it.)
The Buddha’s talk to his cousin and long-time attendant Ananda about that lesson (DN 15) contains eighteen appearances of a word which Oxford’s Professor Gombrich explains means, basically, “not literal” — pariyāya — in the first half, where the usual terms that get taken to mean the Buddha is describing rebirth are used (while in the second half, when he’s talking about concepts of the self, he doesn’t use pariyāya at all, because how we create concepts of self is literally what dependent arising describes).
So yes, exactly, what the Buddha taught was secular from the beginning; its insightfulness very advanced and, now that I’ve come to understand how he used those rebirth terms in that lesson, I’d say he created a piece of art like no other we have a record of. He was brilliant.
It’s funny that you mention “Know thyself!” — a mantra so familiar in the hippy days of my youth and one I had so much trouble with. “How does one go about doing that?” was my constant refrain. Ironic, isn’t it, that I had to get half-way through my life before understanding the lesson that teaches how to know thyself and explains why it’s so challenging to do it.
Thanks Linda.
I, for one, would be very interested in your research on Dependent Arising. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Could you summarise it in a follow-up article for us….so long as the SBN editorial group agree with that?
Ric
Summarizing my research on Dependent Arising, hmmm. Well, I would have a question for you before I try.
I can summarize my post-research understanding of it in a paragraph, and that might be useful.
Basically, in the first section (the first five links) the Buddha effectively tells us that we arrive in the world ignorant of the ways we inadvertently cause suffering, that the cause is basically that it’s our nature to create a self that we mistake as lasting. In the middle section (links six through nine), he details the habits of thought that act to create that self, and then in the last three links he describes the results.
But obviously that summary misses a lot.
I can try for just a little more detail and say that in the first section — I sometimes call it “The Givens” — the Buddha is expressing the way we come into the world with a desire for existence, which parallels the Vedic creation myth about the beginning of all existence. And that — just as in that myth — that desire causes the arising of a consciousness hungry for that existence but ignorant of whether it exists or not, so it drives the body-mind complex to seek information through the senses, and in that process of seeking, creates the conditions that cause us to create that which we mistake for lasting self. In my practice, I find that description paralleling the way we seek information about the world and our place in it from an early age, which at its initial level is simply survival instinct kicking in, but as we get older goes beyond the necessities of self-preservation of our physical selves, escalating up to identifying with belief systems that we make part of our selves, fighting to preserve that.
I can go deeper than that to provide more detail, putting not just “the why” that I just explained, but “the how” into plain English, but I am never quite sure how much that helps, for a couple of reasons. One is that doing so doesn’t give any helpful insight into the way the Buddha expressed these things, so that in the future, there’s no gain in understanding the Buddha better when reading translations of his talks. This ties to a second difficulty, which is that a great deal of the depth of what he’s saying is expressed through intricately-layered metaphors that are meant to be interpreted loosely, not strictly, as our English language tends toward. It is, I think, the original basis for the very Buddhist understanding that what’s being pointed out has to be seen for oneself, which is why we’re so often told to not cling to the texts. And finally, if I just straight out try to explain it in a summary, without presenting the evidence to support my understanding, why should anyone take my word for it?
That final point is complicated by just how much evidence there is (there’s a lot) and that’s balanced by the subtlety of the textual evidence. If the Buddha had ever come right out and said, “What I’m saying should not be taken literally. I know it sounds like I’m talking about rebirth but it’s not literal,” the redactors who later chose which bits were truly the Buddha’s (and so passed them on) and which were words being put in his mouth would have removed it. Well actually he did effectively say that to Ananda once, eighteen times in DN 15, but it was subtle enough that the redactors missed it, as do modern translators.
So what I’d like to ask you, Ric, is what sort of summarizing you’d like to see, and I’ll give it a try.
Thank you Linda. You present such an amazing depth of scholarship, and, unless I’m mistaken have come up with an understanding very close to my own. I find this quite exciting.
As I mentioned, my background is in Clinical Medicine and Public Health, both of which are branches of Applied Biological Science. I require a biological, cause-and-effect understanding of our human situation. The only scholarship I relied on was provided by Stephen Batchelor in his many books. For instance, Stephen, somewhere in his books suggested that Gotama the Buddha, when he was young, may have attended Taxila University up in NW India in the then Gandhara. Stephen suggests that if the Buddha himself didn’t attend Taxila, then at least his close friend Javika, the doctor, most likely did. This suggests that the two of them may well have been aware of the awakening of Greek thinking in these early years of the Axial Age. Scholars such as Thales and Heraclitus.
My Pali scripture “scholarship”, if one could call it that, goes as far as picking my own translation of the key Pali words of Dependent Arising in the NON-Buddhist Online Pali Dictionary. My excuse for experimenting with that rather than using the Buddhist Pali Online Dictionary was that I thought it likely that the Buddhist version would have listed “accepted”, Buddhist Scholar approved, meanings for the words I was interested in.
The conclusion I came to was that the Buddha was describing to Ananda the most common and very organic human origins of sexual desire, status seeking, envy, possessiveness, stealing, and fighting. This sounds so simple and obvious to us in our modern shambolic world, but the context is everything. The Buddha was saying that our problems are in our human nature and we cannot blame past lives, or evil spirits. This would have been so contrary for the Brahman scholars of the day.
Thanks for that detail, Ric. I believe that’s given me enough information to provide a starting point for an article.
Just a hint (and a reminder to myself): as I understand what the Buddha was doing with Dependent Arising, in using the then-common understanding in his culture, of our origins, the myth of the beginning of the universe and its ties to the self (atman), as well as the rituals based on that mythos, all of that goes back to the Vedic poets who created the Vedas, Brahmanas, and were developing the Upanisads before, during, and for centuries after the Buddha’s lifetime. Their origin myth directly parallels human procreation. So your explorations gave you a useful clue. (And, not coincidentally, I had that same epiphany shortly before I read Jurewicz’ paper, which connected it all up for me.)
I absolutely support your explorations in the Pali, the same method I used in the beginning, middle, and currently! I rely on the Digital Pali Reader. Nowadays it’s online and (as it always was) free to use. I love that we can just click on a word and it will offer dictionary definitions. With compounds, it not only suggests a breakdown and you can get entries for individual components, but a drop-down box offers other possible breakdowns of the compound, since its first choice is not always right. A wonderful tool.
https://www.digitalpalireader.online/_dprhtml/index.html