About

The core of The Buddhist Ethics & Action Network is the intention to support millions of Buddhist practitioners especially in the West to shift their understanding of practice! Yes, it’s wonderful for practitioners to continue with their daily half hour of formal practice, informed by wisdom teachings. The shift in the sense of practice comes when such practitioners say to themselves, “I also want to commit weekly to 1-3 hours (or more) of ‘ethical practice,’ in the way that most calls to me.” Perhaps that person would be at times helping a neighbor or relative in need, or working on a community concern, or helping with broader social issues such as the climate crisis, growing authoritarianism, and the other issues mentioned above.

Each person would go through a process, perhaps in the context of community or working with a teacher, similar to the process one of my students went through, connecting ethical practice with responding to social concerns. She met with me and told me, “I want to be active and help address larger issues.” I asked, “What issue do you want to address?” She responded, “Climate issues.” Her commitment to the first precept of protecting life had led her to want to protect the earth and the beings of the earth.

I then asked, “How much time a week do you have?” She responded, “Five hours.” I then invited her to research several groups or organizations with which she might work, and meet with me in a week. She came back and was clear about the organization with which she would work, and committed to five hours a week! She stayed working with that organization regularly for several years until her ethical practice shifted to raising a child.

We want to support millions of people going through something like that simple yet profound process that my student experienced. On our website, we’ll identify perhaps twenty larger social and ecological concerns, as well as both organizations compatible with Buddhist practice, some Buddhist-based, and suggestions of multiple ways of being involved with a given issue, including ways to volunteer, donate, make calls, write letters, and act in other ways.

We’ll also give resources and identify supports for the different forms of ethical practice. We’ll point to ways of developing wise speech, a foundational capacity in ethical practice, and many resources (writings, recordings, upcoming trainings, etc.) in this area. We’ll suggest how to work meditatively with the ups and downs of engagement, including being skillful with difficult emotions, thoughts, and body states; staying in touch with joy, compassion, metta, and equanimity; and finding what helps with balance and perspective for the long haul.

We’ll also make available resources and supports to help us integrate training in wisdom with ethical practice and meditation, helping us to see how our practices addressing particular issues or concerns are supported by seeing the world with “wisdom eyes” (backed up by some knowledge of history). How is a particular issue in large part structured by a history of greed, hatred, and delusion (individual and institutional) in the world? How do we see how the ethical precepts are at times violated in our institutions and policies and by our leaders? Where in our society do we find groups, organizations, and institutions that support and are in accord with the ethical precepts? How do we maintain the deeper vision of awakening—both individual and collective—in our engagement, remembering, as is said in Proverbs 29:18, that “Where there is no vision, the people perish”? How do we stay in touch with a vision that help us to imagine successfully addressing a given problem or crisis and going beyond it to a transformed collective way of being?

My friend, mentor, and teacher Joanna Macy, who died last year at the age of 96, spoke of three aspects of what she called “The Great Turning” to a sustainable world. These three aspects integrate as well the three dimensions of Buddhist training—in wisdom, meditation, and ethical practice. The first is stopping further damage from occurring, which is guided by ethical practice, but requires the other two forms of training. The second is changing consciousness, which corresponds especially to training in meditation, on the basis of wisdom, and then bringing the changed consciousness out into our being in the world. The third is developing transformed institutions, especially guided by vision grounded in wisdom that directs creative ethical practice, supported by meditation.

Historian Howard Zinn tells us, “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in progress and change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” This is the vision of the Sila Project.

Contributors

Donald Rothberg