The Journalist and the Buddha

“That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.” — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

“The press really has a hard time telling you why what the Dalai Lama is doing and what Jimmy Swaggart is doing are different. It doesn’t really understand that. And that’s one of the most astonishing disasters we are facing.”  — Ken Wilber

I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice what a natural Buddhist Cesar Milan — AKA “The Dog Whisperer” on the National Geographic TV Channel — stunningly, beautifully, is.

On each episode, Cesar, a dog trainer, meets with the owners of dogs that are hyper-aggressive, hyper-anxious, or hyper-fearful. He interviews the owners for a while, and then he meets the dogs and notices their behavior — barking at passersby, growling at anyone who approaches their food, biting visitors, twirling in circles, etc.

Cesar always starts by interviewing the owners for a while. Then he watches the problem behavior in their dog. Then he says a few profound things to the owners and does a few things with the dogs, and within a few minutes (edited down from a few hours of actual training) the dogs appear to have reversed years of bad behavior and are suddenly submissive, happy, and friendly.

Cesar always leaves each appointment telling the dog owners they need to continue their own mental training that they began on that day. The owners need to learn how to access their own natural ability to be calm and assertive, and to communicate that energy to their dogs.

If the owners do that, their dogs will get better and better and finally be completely cured of their problems. If the owners don’t solve their own neuroses, though, the bad behaviors will continue.

Dogs, Cesar likes to say, always live in the present.

Therefore, if the present is calm and peaceful, the dogs will be calm and peaceful. So it’s up to the owner to become calm and peaceful.

“I rehabilitate dogs and I train people,” Cesar says.

You probably have already figured out that the dogs’ problematic behaviors always – always – mirror the aggressive, fear or anxiety of their owners’ minds. So the real trick of Milan’s technique is to convince the owners that this is true, that this is the real dynamic of the problem. In other words, that the only way to cure the dog’s problem is for the owners to recognize and treat the problem in their own minds.

The instructive parallels to meditation continue. The way that Cesar calms down the dogs is a perfect demonstration of how a skilled meditator calms down the mind during meditation.

Normally, Cesar snaps the dogs out of their unwholesome mind-states with a single gesture — a poke of his hand, which he holds like a jaw with exposed teeth. He applies this jaw-like hand in a single sharp jab applied to the dog’s shoulder, or to forward part of the spine, behind the neck.

If the dog is super-aggressive, Cesar muscles the dog to the ground and applies his hand-jaw to the dog’s neck with firm consistent downward pressure. He is in now way angry or fighting with the dog, he is just keeping the dog pinned down. Time after time, dogs that one second are barking or biting or spinning are sitting happily and quietly by Cesar’s side. And dogs that one moment were in full-fledged attack mode – their teeth bared and going for the jugular — are on their sides, their tongues hanging out of their mouths, getting affectionate tummy rubs from Cesar.

This more sustained application of calm assertive energy to the dog is comparable to meditation, in which mindful awareness is focused, moment after moment, on whatever we choose to notice in the mind-body. Just as anger, fear and aggression soften and fade away when submitted to sustained mindfulness in meditation, so do Cesar’s crazed dogs calm into a very obvious and visible bliss when he keeps his hand-jaw applied to their necks as they lie down.

To see this on Cesar’s show is to see that the human mind wants to be trained, to be calmed, and to be submissive. Because each dog is a perfect reflection of a human mind, each episode stunningly demonstrates that the mind needs to be submissive to a higher power in order to be happy.

In most cases, all it takes to bring the unruly dog — i.e., the unruly mind — under control is a quick sharp touch of the hand-jaw. The passing poke to the aggressive dog (mind) is so lightly and briefly applied that it it is nothing more than a reminder, really. A reminder of who is in charge, who is in control.

This brief reminder — this single moment of mindfulness — is visibly seen to magically transfer the calmness of Cesar’s innate awareness to the dog’s mind and body.

The Dog Whisperer vividly demonstrates the essential “two-ness” of every human being. We are mindful awareness, but we are also mind. And mind is like a baby. It’s undisciplined. It’s sprawling. The mind wants, wants, wants, and it searches, searches, searches, and it cries, cries, cries. It throws tantrums when it doesn’t get what it wants. But it doesn’t really know what it wants, so it never gets what it wants and is therefore never satisfied.

The only solution is for the mind to be disciplined by the other part of us, our mindful awareness, which through its naturally calm and assertive energy bring the mind under control. Mindful awareness can focus the mind’s unruly energy through brief reminder-jabs, and can calm the dangerously violent mind through more sustained moment-to-moment attention.

When the mind submits in this way, it lies down and happily takes tummy rubs.

Beautiful!

Here are some of Cesar’s Buddhist-flavored axioms for rehabilitating dogs and training people:

• “Send the brain to a calm, assertive state, and walk. Even if you take only one step, that is an accomplishment. This is all you have to do.”
• “You can’t live in the past or future if you want to help a dog.”
• “You must ask yourself ‘Who am I now, as energy?’”
• “Dogs don’t introduce themselves to a name. They introduce themselves to energy.”
• About his dog, Daddy: “His energy creates a lot of peace.”
• In one situation: Excitement would not be a good energy to have.”
• “Don’t give emotions. Just be in the moment.”
• “Don’t practice bad energy.”
• “We need to learn how to redirect energy.”
• “What you project is what comes out.”
• “Stay calm and assertive and the world will follow that.”
• “To drive a motorcycle you need to be calm and assertive.”
  
• “You don’t have to go anywhere to relax. Just get into the zone and go.”
• “There’s no magic, just living in the moment.”
• “You don’t just have bad moments, you have good moments. This is a good moment.”
• “You need to be reborn with the pack so you can start using common sense. There is no common sense in a state of insecurity.”
• “I want you to show affection to yourself. When you do that all the animals in the neighborhood will feel that and will feel good.”
• “You can have a big castle. You still need to go out.”
• “Pack leaders never say ‘Let’s go.’ They just go.”
• “The thing I like about this story is it’s not not a story, it’s reality.”
• “You can’t be angry but you have to disagree with the behavior.”
• “We are not getting rid of instincts, we are just controlling aggression.”
  

Four paragraphs by a speech given by the author Karen Armstrong in 2007 pinpoints the problem that is the focus of this blog and  proposes a logical solution (my underlines):

“The modernity that gave us the freedoms we celebrate today has also been spectacularly violent, because our technology has enabled us to kill each other with greater efficiency than ever before.  This aggression is not only revealed in warfare but has even invaded a harmless activity like football.

The discourse of our democratic societies — in parliamentary debates, the media, academia and the law courts — is essentially confrontational and agonistic. Instead of simply seeking the truth, we also want to defeat our opponents.   It is not surprising that, when people feel threatened, religious rhetoric has also become belligerent, offensive and dismissive of rival viewpoints.

“Religions are not inherently disposed to violence and intolerance. Every single one of the major world traditions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has developed its own version of the Golden Rule — “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you” — and made compassion the litmus test of true spirituality. They have also insisted that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group but must have what the Chinese call jian ai, ‘concern for everybody.’ The religious have not always lived up to these high ideals, of course, but at its most authentic, faith should be a force for reconciliation
and respect.

“But this will not happen in an antagonistic environment. The religious are not the only people who have become dogmatic and chauvinist in these difficult times. Every single one of the ‘fundamentalist’ movements that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a deep fear of annihilation, convinced that modern secular society wants to wipe them out. In almost every case, this militant piety originally developed in response to an aggressive secularist or liberal assault. Sometimes this was military or political; sometimes merely the result of a disdainful media campaign. And history shows that every subsequent attack — military, political or cultural –  simply made these fundamentalisms more extreme, because it confirmed their suspicion that the secular world was indeed out to destroy them.

“Our major challenge today is to build a global community, where people of all persuasions can live together in peace. If we do not manage this, we are unlikely to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. Any ideology, therefore, be it religious or secular, that breeds discord and contempt or which distorts and denigrates the sacred traditions of another in order to defend its own will fail the test of our time.”

Students in my undergraduate journalism class at Carleton College would never imagine, I’ll bet, that I sincerely regard each one of them as being ethically spotless, all-knowing, absolutely perfect human beings who at one point in the cosmic past was my dear mother.

Being a Buddhist carries along with it lots of interesting implications for classroom teaching. One of the more famous Zen adages says “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” That’s a handy reminder how to handle pet theories and received wisdom of all kinds. The Buddha’s prescription for ethical speech – that it be truthful, gentle, timely and tending to harmonize not divide – is another constant and helpful Buddhist teaching guide. But my favorite Buddhist maxim with virtually endless classroom applications is a Tibetan saying that resolves discordant situations in a flash: “Regard all sentient beings as equal to your dear mother.”

I’ve been meditating for 25 years. For the last ten or so, I’ve also studied a branch of Buddhism called Theravada, which is based in Southeast Asia and uses Buddhism’s primary text – the Pali Canon – as its main source. The Pali Canon comprises the closest existing record of the Buddha’s actual sermons, stories, discourses on psychology, and rules for monks. I run a weekly meditation group at my home and practice “vipassana” or “insight meditation” every day. The aim of insight meditation is to investigate reality as it is experienced in the body and mind in the present moment.

Aside from regarding students as my dear mother, Buddhism influences my teaching in three main ways. The first is that I consciously try to learn good teaching techniques from the Buddha, who is sometimes called “The Great Teacher.” He is certainly the best teacher I’ve ever had. Second, I apply in my classrooms an approach to truth-finding that I’ve learned in meditation and Buddhist scriptural study.  Third, as a result of my Buddhist experience, I treat my classroom as a laboratory for an applied ethics of compassion. By compassion, I don’t refer to the “sorrow and sympathy” dictionary definition. Rather, the Buddhist tradition of compassion, or “karuna,” defines compassion as a virtuous mental state that is capable of nurture and cultivation, and which is the root of all morality and ethical action.

In seeing the Buddha as a model teacher, I join an ancient tradition. The Buddha often stressed that he was not a God or any kind of divine being, but rather was a human being who discovered a set of cosmic truths which he then taught to others. He saw himself as a teacher above all. Records and commentaries on the Buddha’s life are rich in descriptions of his ability to teach the dharma in many ways – by stories, parables, allegories, discourses, sermons, logic, argument and analysis – always choosing one or another form depending on the circumstance and the capacity of his student.

The Buddha’s having chosen the life of a teacher is itself an inspiration to me as an aspiring teacher. It speaks to teaching as a vital activity connecting many dimensions – personal, civic, spiritual, ethical, practical. Through the Buddha’s personal example I understand how skilful teaching facilitates harmony across all these spheres. Seen this way, teaching is not simply about the education of individuals in areas of expertise. More fundamentally, it’s about the making and healing of communities, the forging of trust and friendships, and the support of the poor, the weak, and all of those who suffer.

An often-quoted Buddhist scripture, the Kalama Sutta, forms the second main source of Buddhist inspiration for my teaching. Sometimes called the Buddha’s Charter of Free Inquiry, it tells the story of a group of villagers who belong to the Kalama tribe. The Kalamas are vexed by a constant procession of monks, priests, and yogis who traipse through their town, each espousing a universal doctrine while disparaging all the others.

“Venerable sir, there is doubt, there is uncertainty in us concerning them,” the Kalamas tell the Buddha. “Which of these reverend monks and Brahmins spoke the truth and which falsehood?”

To which the Buddha responds:

"It is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher.' Kalamas, when you yourselves know: 'These things are bad; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill,' abandon them.”

Scholars love to cite the Kalama Sutta for its foreshadowing of the Enlightenment and scientific method – skeptical, empirical, rational inquiry.

As a teacher, I take a simpler lesson from the Kalama Sutta. To me it says that learning occurs only once students have verified the truth for themselves – within themselves and by themselves. It’s not really my job, in other words, to teach students what I know. Instead, it’s to create the conditions in which a very particular sort of magic – more an act of self-teaching than of teaching — is given the very highest probability to occur.

Finally, a vigorous dispute in modern Buddhist circles gives me the fuel to teach my classes in a Buddhist-inspired way. The dispute is rooted in the interpretation of the basic Buddhist teaching of the Noble Eightfold Path – the path to enlightenment. Its name notwithstanding, the path actually divides into three main activities – meditation, morality, and wisdom. For some Buddhist teachers, Buddhism in Western countries focuses too much on meditation, as if enlightening wisdom is gained primarily by sitting on a meditation cushion for years on end. These critics of the “mainly-meditation” path to enlightenment – and I’m in this camp – insist that a full one-third of the Buddhist path to enlightenment consists of acting morally in the world through virtuous speech, virtuous action, and virtuous livelihood.

A famous scripture quoting the Buddha begins with the lines: “Virtue has non-remorse as its benefit and reward; Non-remorse has gladness as its benefit and reward.” The verse continues upwards, linking higher and higher states of being –gladness leading to joy, joy leading to serenity, serenity leading to happiness, happiness leading to concentration, concentration leading to insight, insight leading to non-attachment, and non-attachment leading to final liberation – nirvana, enlightenment.

The verse concludes: “In this way, virtue leads step by step to the highest.”

There you have it: virtue leads to enlightenment. I see the classroom as a place to practice virtue in this Buddhist sense – to try to speak, to act, and to practice livelihood ethically. I know that I can’t teach my way to enlightenment. But according to the Buddha, it’s a good place to start.

ROCHESTER, MN — Jim Reynolds began his 40-minute talk to a group of Mayo Clinic physicians and health care workers last week by closing his eyes, putting his palms together and intoning an ancient chant in a dead language.

"I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging; I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness; I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying,” he chanted to the group of doctors, first in the archaic Indian Pali language, and then in an English translation.

Jim Reynolds, you will have guessed by now, is a Buddhist monk. He is actually known now only by his Buddhist name, Ajahn Chandako, and he serves as the abbot of a monastery near Auckland, New Zealand.

His head is shaved, he never handles money, and he owns little more than his begging bowl, a pair of sandals, and the coffee-colored robes on his back.

Ajahn Chandako (the name Chandako means "one who aspires") is also a Minneapolis native and a Buddhist spiritual teacher with a growing international reputation. Last week, he returned to his home state to teach people how to meditate and to give a series of pithy, gently humorous talks in Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Northfield and Rochester.

Graveyard Humor

"When I lived in monasteries in Thailand, the meditation halls sometimes had human skeletons hanging in them,” Ajahn told the group of 70 Mayo Clinic employees, flashing a mischievous ear-to-ear smile. “The skeletons hung there for everyone to reflect on, and they had little handwritten signs on them that read: ‘Once I was like you. And one day you will be like me.’”

A knowing chuckle rippled through the room. The health care workers absorbed Ajahn’s graveyard humor as pragmatic wisdom – a useful reminder, perhaps, of nature’s ultimate primacy over all the powers of medicine.

At the end of his Mayo talk, an eager hand shot up in the front row.

“Could you show us how to meditate?” a woman asked.

So, for a few minutes, in a conference room in the middle of a busy Mayo Clinic day, Ajahn taught people how to close their eyes and summon internal spaciousness and ease by using only focused attention and wholesome intention – the channeled inner zeal to become disease free.

Broad Compassion

From a Buddhist view, Ajahn told the Mayo audience, illness is a profound opportunity for spiritual transformation.

“In the old days, if you were a forest monk in Thailand, it was almost inevitable that you would get malaria,” he said. “So when you finally got it, you wouldn’t see it as something abnormal, but rather as a normal human experience and an opportunity for spiritual practice.”

When skillfully and fearlessly embraced, Ajahn said, illness offers a rare chance to directly experience the most essential truths of nature. While unwelcome and painful, such an experience naturally imparts an intrinsic wisdom that can replace deep-seated arrogance with humility, anxiety with equanimity, and narrow self-regard with broad compassion.

Rock and Roll

The story of Ajahn Chandako’s emergence as a leading Buddhist teacher encompasses an epic journey from a bright teenager with a passion for drums, to a globe-trotting wanderer, to a disciplined meditator in jungle huts, to the worldly-wise New Zealand abbot and global spiritual teacher that he is today.

Born and raised in Minneapolis and Massachusetts, and a 1984 graduate of Carleton College in comparative religion, Ajahn Chandako says his boyhood was a happy one. He doesn’t recall a particular leaning towards Buddhism, except for one thing.

"If I saw a photograph of a Buddhist monk, something went off inside of me,” he said. “It struck me hard like a gong. It hit the depth of my heart.”

Throughout his high school college years, that strange inner call took a back seat to typical teenage distractions, especially rock and roll. He was a drummer in several bands – in “The Generic Band” the musicians wore plain white T-shirts that read “Drummer,” “Guitarist” and “Singer.”

Last Fling

Social injustice and environmental problems stirred a strong desire to act in response, Ajahn said, but he was dogged by a sense of unreadiness.

“Even if there is sincerity, there may not be the wisdom to know what is helpful and what is destructive,” he said. “Increasingly, I began to think that at least I can clean up this little corner of the environment” – here he pointed to himself. “I could clean up my own mind, and my own behavior."

His first taste of the monastic life came on long meditation retreats after college at the Hokyoji Zen Practice Community in southeast Minnesota, under the famous meditation teacher, Katagiri Roshi. Those were followed by even longer stints as a lay meditator at a monastery in Thailand, where he was first exposed to Buddhist monastic life that was fully integrated into a society where monks had a firm and high standing.

Harrowing Journey

Nearly ready to don the monk’s robes, Ajahn decided he wanted to travel widely through Tibet, which would be impossible once he ordained. This remarkable interlude is described in one of the most beautifully-written travel memoirs ever penned by an almost-monk, The Outer Path – Finding My Way in Tibet.

The story describes a harrowing foot-and-bicycle journey to Tibet in 1987, long before it was easy for Westerners to travel there. The book combines gorgeous descriptive prose with a young man’s struggle to meet the demands of an overwhelming inner drive to undertake ascetic discipline.

“Although I’m traveling lightly, I’m still carrying too much baggage,” he writes one evening by candlelight in a drafty cave carved into the cliffs overlooking Lake Manasarovar in remote western Tibet.

Bright Lights

"Often I feel in the awkward position of being half-monk, half-adventurer. I no longer take things like worldly achievement, social expectations, and money seriously, but I’m still living a secular life. I’m beginning to think like a monk, yet I continue to follow old habits.”

Staring at the brightly flickering candle by which he writes, Ajahn reflects on the pitfalls of his adventurous life, from his rock-and-roll days to his run-ins with Chinese police and nearly dying of hypothermia in Tibet.

“An insect appeared, circled the flame, and dove in to its death. It occurred to me that I am not much smarter. Attracted by bright lights, how many times have I jumped into the fire and been burned?”

Within a few months, Ajahn had returned to his Thailand monastery, shed all his excess baggage, shaved his head, and turned in his shirts and pants and shoes for a few plain squares of cloth and sandals.

Outward Ripples

"I could have gone off to the Amazon and become an ecoterrorist, blowing up bulldozers that were ruining the rainforest,” Ajahn said. “But I knew that would potentially harm other people, and it wouldn’t come from a peaceful mind. If one is practicing meditation correctly, it naturally leads to a reduction in anger and selfishness and greed. It very directly affects the people around us, our family and friends, the people we know best.

“Ripples start to go out in unseen ways. Immediately, the idea that meditation is somehow selfish just doesn’t make sense. It has immediate and far-reaching benefits.”

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — There is an old interviewing trick journalists use to  get people to say things far more intimate than they planned to reveal.   

The trick works when the journalist, instead of asking a follow-up question during the silence that follows an answer, instead stays silent. The compulsion to fill conversational vacuums is so powerful that people often blab intimacies they didn’t mean to share.

That interviewing ploy is one of many ethical shortcuts I used as a reporter and editor in the mainstream press for more than twenty years, first as a reporter for The New York Times, and then later as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong.

As the years passed, I cut more and more ethical corners as a journalist to get exclusive stories, to elicit juicy anecdotes and quotes, and to get my stories the best possible play on the newswire or in the newspaper — preferably on page one.

Verbal Steroids

I became a serial exaggerator of social trends. Increasingly, I started defining every trend as ”new and important,” ”widespread,” or ”emblematic.”

My writing vocabulary was getting showy and meretricious (and a Happy New Year!), and I began avoiding humble but specific, useful words. 

I got hooked on such verbal journalistic steroids as ”unprecedented,”  ”in a dramatic new development,” ”revolutionary,” and ”raises new and troubling questions.” I felt sheepish, hangdog and worse. But I kept using.

Sometime I’d get to the part of the story where I needed to type in these phrases, and I’d literally feel sick.

Was I really going to do this again, I’d ask myself?

Usually, I would. Because when I injected these particular words my stories and — most important — my byline shot straight onto the front page.

And that felt oh, so good. But where was the end to these addictions?

Extreme Reality

Of course, deeper ethical issues face the modern global journalist, language-wise.

The world is filled with violent words and actions that journalists must sometimes, of necessity, report. Sugar-coating reality would be an ethical lapse equal or even greater than occasionally exaggerating social trends.

The world is filled with realities so extreme they are literally beyond the reach of language, used at its most extreme, to accurately describe. But even straight and well-intentioned reporting of such violence, incendiary language, and extreme reality can kick the cycle of violence to even more violent rounds.

What morals should guide a journalist’s professional purpose, reporting methods, and use of language in such a world?

In recent years, Buddhism’s doctrines on life’s purpose, human suffering, and ethical speech  have seemed to me to suggest — as no other moral system I have yet found — practical answers to such questions facing a global media.

Practical Morals

There is a spiritual side to Buddhism, it’s true. But its most appealing trait to me from the beginning has been its straightforward and empirically-based morals. It asks not a speck of faith from anyone. Yet it offers a comprehensive and practical human morals of which speech is an integral part.

In this way, Buddhism seems tailor-made for journalism’s ethical, and increasingly global and multicultural, needs.

Indeed, in its relentless quest to observe without filter or distortion the nature of daily human existence — the fact and flavor of the simple ordinary present, the living now — Buddhism seems, in a certain way, quintessentially journalistic. 

In my early years as a journalist, I was happy to discover the world through journalism. My youthful curiosity and optimism carried me through those years.

My drive to explore the world more widely (if not more deeply) trumped the ethical questions that always tagged behind.

Ethics Codes

It’s only natural, I suppose, that with age the question of one’s purpose looms larger. You’ve only got so many days in life, and so many chances to direct one’s attention with positive intention and purpose. 

For a few years, I searched for an ethical system within the profession, or even from another profession, that addressed these concerns. Basically, I got nowhere. I found out that journalists don’t like to talk about the moral basis of what they do, which is to use language. They are practically allergic to such a thing. That’s got to change if journalism is going to evolve ethically and globally.

Journalism’s moral obtuseness is enshrined in its ethics codes.

The specific injunctions of these guides to newsroom practice — not to plagiarize, not to lie get a story, not to cause anyone harm, etc. — are nowhere connected to any fundamental vision of human existence or morals.

That may sound like too grand a hope for journalism, but medical and legal ethics are grounded in this way. Why not journalism and the media?

Kant and Mill

By now, surely, the enormous impact of the media on global affairs is obvious enough to warrant thinking more seriously about media morals, beginning with the morals of journalism, which is the public service branch of the media.

Journalists wishing to go deeper ethically than their profession allows, as I did on my quest, traditionally look to Enlightenment philosophers for enlightenment.

In particular, ethics courses at communication schools teach the ”utilitarian” ethics of John Stuart Mill, and the ”duty-based” ethics of Immanuel Kant. 

Mill’s utilitarian ethic calls for examining each case to determine if the greatest good is achieved for the greatest number. The Kantian ethic, by contrast, asks people to question if a given action would help or harm society if it was repeated by everyone. Could it be ”universalized” to society’s benefit?

These approaches have great appeal because they define communication ethics as a matter of general human morals, and not of daily expedience.

Buddhist Media

And yet, how impractical Mill and Kant are!

Enlightenment philosophers, I discovered, ascribe superhuman powers to ordinary people. Can any single person reasonably guess, with any degree of accuracy, whether a given act of speech will result in ”the greatest good for the greatest number”? Or whether it could be ”universalized without harm?”

Since when could any being but a God do such a thing? Neither the morals of Mill nor of Kant are easily translated, in practical terms, to individuals facing daily life situations, much less to hyperactive, competitive newsrooms. 

It was in Buddhism that I finally found an explicit and practical morals of human communication. Since I discovered its doctrines a few years ago, my ethics thinking has centered around the question whether it might be possible to develop a new journalism based on such universal yet practical principles.

A journalism grounded in Buddhist morals would display two salient traits derived from its moral purpose and methods. Such a journalism would be:

1. A journalism of healing. Buddhism is often not classified as a religion because it teaches no theology, declares no divinity, and requires no faith. Instead, its doctrines revolve entirely around the achievement of a practical goal: “the end of suffering.” Nor is the definition of suffering complex or esoteric. It is ordinary everyday suffering, aches and pains, mental moods and afflictions, sickness and death. On a social level, suffering in Buddhism is defined as any harshness, violence, and division of the community.  A Buddhist journalism would therefore be aimed at helping individuals overcome their personal sufferings, and helping society heal the wounds caused by injustice, hatred, ostracism, and physical violence. Such a defined professional purpose would give the Buddhist journalist a measuring stick for each word and story produced: does it help overcome individual and social suffering?

2. A journalism of timely, truthful, helpful speech. A Buddhist journalism would need tools and materials adequate to its healing purpose. The Buddhist “Right Speech” doctrine provides many of them. Right Speech sits midway along the “Noble Eightfold Path,” the Buddha’s prescribed method to reach the end of suffering. The midway place of Right Speech along the Noble Eightfold Path is interesting, because speech is the first action to follow the gaining of wisdom and positive intention, as developed in meditation. By this view, speech is a person’s very first chance to act morally in the world. It is followed then in the Noble Eightfold Path by “Right Action” and “Right Livelihood.”  Also, very helpfully for journalists, the identifying traits of Right Speech are specifically defined as “timely, truthful, helpful, and spoken with a mind of good will.” Likewise, the five main types of speech to avoid are lies, divisive speech, harsh and abusive speech, and idle and distracting speech.

Can a new global journalism of healing be practiced that embraces timely, truthful and helpful speech, and avoids the five destructive modes?

It would be important and interesting to find out.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

For Part 1 of the Burleigh Lecture, click here.
For Part 2, click here.

Unitarian Universalist Church, Rochester, MN

Sunday Sermon, February 17, 2008

ROCHESTER, MN — I picked the topic for today’s
sermon, ”Do Buddhists Believe in God?”, because I’m asked occasionally to speak
about Buddhism at churches around town. This is usually the first question to
come up. If it’s not the first question, it’s at least always the one that generates
the most interest and anxiety in the room. 

Everything goes quiet when somebody
finally asks, ”Do Buddhists believe in God?” I believe this quiet that descends
is out of deference for what most people today believe is the ultimate
question, the one that spiritually matters the most. 

The Buddha was careful in answering this question. On the one hand, he often maintained a Sphinx-like silence when asked it, refusing to answer one way or another. At other times, he implied that the answer was "neither knowable nor unknowable," and that spending lots of time and argument trying to find an answer was therefore "not conducive to spiritual life." 

And yet, there is an important
sense, one that serious Buddhists acknowledge, in which questions about God certainly
are the ultimate spiritual questions. 

Many contemporary Buddhists consider
this.   

Haven’t each of us had moments
where we seem to be in touch, even if briefly, with a higher power? No matter
what our religion, this is a common human experience which we register not just
intellectually, but even more so bodily, emotionally, and spiritually. 

During such moments and sometimes
long after, we may feel the powerful, natural arising of positive intentions such
as compassion, equanimity, generosity, patience and truthfulness. 

What are these moments about? Why
do they happen? 

Where does morality come from? 

Seen in this way, few if any
Buddhist masters from 2,500 years of history would object to saying that Buddhist
practice is about finding this living God within oneself, and in one’s daily
life.  

There are three major contemporary teachers
on the relationship of Buddhism to Judeo-Christian notions of God. They are the
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and many recent Buddhist interpreters of the Gnostic Gospels, discovered in
the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

The Dalai Lama compares Christian
notions of God and compassion to Buddhist teachings. His favorite device is to
compare Buddhist texts to Bible passages, such as the Matthew 5 passage where
Jesus teaches people to turn the other cheek and ”To love your enemies and pray
for your persecutors.” 

The Dalai Lama says: ”This passage could
be introduced into a Buddhist text and it would not even be recognized as
traditional Christian scriptures.” To demonstrate, he quotes the Dhammapada, a
collection of the Buddha’s sayings, whose most  famous passage reads: ”’He insulted me, he hurt
me, he defeated me, he robbed me.’ Those who think such thoughts will not be
free from hate. For hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love.
This is eternal law.” 

The Gnostic Gospels, as most of you
probably know, are the ”lost gospels” of early Christianity. Many  people believe these texts describe authentic
Christianity, that is, before institutional religion distorted Jesus’ original teachings
to suit the needs of a powerful, global, proselytizing church. 

Whether that last accusation is fair,
the Gnostic Gospels surely offer a very Buddhist-like early Christianity, and a
very Buddha-like Jesus. 

For example, the Jesus in the Gnostic
Gospel of Thomas, just like the Buddha in the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow,
time after time warns his followers to avoid trying to find his essence in his words,
or in any system of religious or conceptual thinking. 

Every time his followers try to pin
him down in this way, Jesus spins away. He says in the Gospel of Thomas: 

”If those who
lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ the birds of the sky
will get there first.’ If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get
there first. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will
realize that it is you who are the children of the living father. But if you
will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are
that poverty.” 

The Buddha, like Jesus, used many verbal
ploys to illustrate that his true, living nature had nothing to do with words
or thoughts or definitions.

In one story, soon after his enlightenment,
the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha’s
extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence.

The man stopped and asked, "My
friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?" "No," said the Buddha. "Well,
then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?" Again the Buddha answered, "No." "Are you a
man?" "No." "Well,
my friend, then what are you?" The
Buddha replied, ”I am awake.”

The Buddha taught humans to seek this state
of being awake  within themselves. ”Be a
lamp unto yourselves,” he said.

Jesus also used the metaphor of inner light
to describe his living essence, both in the Bible – ”I am the light of the
world” he says in John 8:12 — and in the Gospel of Thomas when he says: ”I am
the light that is over all. I am the all. The all came forth out of me, and to
me the all has come. Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift a stone, and you
will find me there.”

Instead
of focusing on these words or the ideas they express, you might try an
experiment. What I am offering here is a traditional Buddhist meditation. 

To
understand the meaning of Jesus’s or the Buddha’s inner light, be aware of your
body and your mind as it is right now, at this very moment, right here in
church. Ask ”How is my body and mind right now?” Don’t look or strain to hear anything
special, inner voices or glinting sunbeams, or anything like that. Just note whatever little
aches and pains or heat or tingling you may feel, anywhere in your body, just
little sensations here and there. As ordinary or boring as it may seem, just with
these for as long as you can.

Just
notice whatever is happening in your body and your mind for a few continuous moments.

This
is a standard Buddhist meditation, but it is also, you see, very much like inviting
you to experience your own body and mind as that piece of wood, or the lifted
rock, from the Gospel of Thomas.

This
is where Jesus said he was to be found.

More
than any other contemporary Buddhist, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh
has drawn parallels between the Christian and Buddhist conceptions of God.

Thich
Nhat Hanh calls God by a name that he invented, called ”interbeing.” I’ll end
my remarks today with a passage from Thich Nhat Hanh, taken from his
book that compares Buddhism to Christianity called ”Living Buddha, Living
Christ.”

”When we
look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the
earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be
no rain, there could be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In
fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements. It has no
independent, individual existence. It ‘inter-is’ with everything else in the
universe. When we see the nature of interbeing, barriers between ourselves and
others are dissolved, and peace, love and understanding are possible. Whenever
there is understanding, compassion is born.”

To
Thich Nhat Hanh, to the Dalai Lama, and to many other contemporary Buddhists, the
being born anew every moment – as registered in our everyday aches and pains,
our little spots of passing pleasure and our ordinary sensations – are what really
matters.

This
is not a question to be pondered, a theory to be debated, or a belief to be grasped.

It’s
an experience to be had. And it can be had right here, right now. 

It
is, both Buddha and Jesus tell us, a chance to experience the living God.

Copyright @ 2008 Douglas McGill