Dear Fellow Practitioners on the Path,
In these past six months, our human family throughout the world has met monumental challenges and suffering, for many of us the most drastic in our lifetimes. Today we all have a role to play in the rising tide of collective awakening to racial injustice and systemic inequalities. Together we continue to face the climate and ecological crisis, the virus crisis, and a societal crisis in terms of poverty, class inequality, and the imbalance of power and militarization of our world. It is abundantly clear how all these elements are interconnected consequences of the fundamental human crisis, the spiritual crisis. We practice remembering this shared suffering as a human family caused by our unskillful, toxic, exploitative, and discriminative ways of living across many centuries.
Today we reach out to our spiritual community to invite us to stop, look deeply and broadly, and seize this wonderful and painful moment to dig down honestly into our practice—100 percent, as Thay would say. Where are we with our practice: How are we doing? Are we calm or furious? Are we afraid or invigorated? Are we lonely or sad? Are we engaged or do we want to look the other way? Or are we all of these things? As we honor our emotional experience at this moment and care for what is arising in us, we are invited to examine our lives and our community and help move our world towards a more inclusive and compassionate society.
How can we help, respond to, and participate in this moment of potentiality? We are reminded of our Teacher during the war in Vietnam when the bombing and killing seemed unlikely to end. In his most dire moments, Thay had to pause and hold his face with his two hands to grieve and to keep himself from exploding out of anger. He wrote many poems about the pure love of his childhood to keep his loneliness warm; and he translated Buddhist texts to nourish himself and keep his Bodhicitta alive. He did not only rest there in his inner refuge of the Ultimate Dimension, but used it as the foundation for his rigorous and charged actions to affect the historical events of his time. Thus, there was the continual emergence of our tradition of Engaged Buddhism, of contemplative actions for a healthy, compassionate, and awakened society.
We would like to take this chance to offer some points of departure for reflection, as we explore what we, as practitioners and Sanghas, can contribute. They are not a kind of definitive guidance, but an invitation to come together and look deeply and help our Sangha be a more inclusive, harmonious, and awakened place of refuge for all.
Mindfulness Trainings as a Compass: The Five and the Fourteen
The Mindfulness Trainings are our guide and our teacher. They are the gems in our pocket. In difficult moments, we can turn to them for inspiration and direction. They are a precious and deep inheritance from many generations of teachers, and a concrete expression of our love for ourselves, others, and the planet. We need to regularly show up to recite them together and have discussions about how they apply to our current situation, to collectively check our direction and practice. Reciting the Mindfulness Trainings and looking deeply together will help us identify the right action for ourselves and our community. Mindfulness practice and meditation must go hand in hand with contemplation, a deep-looking into the aspects of our daily lives and social structures to examine their ethical and moral foundation, which can help move us into compassionate and direct action. The Mindfulness Trainings can act as a mirror to examine ourselves and our community to see where new branches can grow and which roots need to go deeper.
Grounding Ourselves in the Energy of Mindfulness, Individually and Collectively
This is a moment to cultivate deep, attentive listening to what is going on within us and around us. It is a time to hear what is being said, and what is also being left unsaid. We must trust in our intuitive insight based on our practice of mindfulness and concentration and not be carried away by the emotions and dispersion of the collective. Stillness and clarity of mind are crucial as we move to mindful action. Our mindfulness sustains our clarity. And when we are clear, we are courageous: we know what to do and not do, we know what needs to be said and not said, and we never veer from the path of compassion. We need to take many moments throughout the day to check in with our body and mind. How is suffering manifesting in our body right now? How can we take care of it and calm it? Can we discern its collective and individual aspects, its base for manifestation? Can we allow ourselves to be kind? Mindfulness is a source of peace, healing, and transformation. Once we have the capacity to be there, listen to, and care for our suffering, it’s time to offer this capacity to listen to the suffering of others.
Lotus in a Sea of Fire
When Thay was confronted with the devastation of war, he took refuge in the insight of eleventh century Vietnamese Zen Master Ngo An, who reminds us that:
The jade burned on the mountain retains its natural color,
The lotus, blooming in the furnace, does not lose its freshness.
We aspire to be the bright jade and the lotus, which retain their essence and deepest values when tested in the fire of adversity. The mind of love remains intact. We aspire not to lose sight of anyone’s humanity and to be aware not to water seeds of vengeance, fanaticism, or self-righteousness. Whatever that jade or lotus is for us, that deep innate knowing or gut feeling, we are determined not to lose our mind of love and compassion, no matter what temptation burns within our furnace.
