The Journalist and the Buddha

The
doctrine of Right Speech (morally skillful speech) holds a pivotal
place in Buddhism’s overall moral system, as a kind of gateway between
thought and action, between moral intention and active expression.

According to the Buddha, speech is the first action that an
individual may positively take in the world following a period of quiet
meditation, and perhaps the achievement of some insight into ”the way
things are” through meditation. The equanimity and inner peace that
may have developed in meditation thus has a chance to be expressed in
the world immediately through speech, even before action.

Crucially, the Buddha explicitly identifies Right Speech as a
necessary step on the path to enlightenment. It is given as the first
of three virtues necessary as a foundation for spiritual growth, the
two others being Right Action (acting so as to help and not harm all
sentient beings) and Right Livelihood (making a living in a useful and
nonviolent way). Put another way, attaining enlightenment without
having mastered Right Speech is impossible. This is true of all three
of the above-named virtues but again, by listing Right Speech above the
other two, the Buddha seems to give it a certain priority as  requiring
that the utmost careful attention be paid to the incredibly subtle, but
also incredibly powerful, uses and abuses of human speech.

It’s important to sketch out the larger system in which Right Speech
holds such a special and pivotal place. That larger moral system, which
essentially contains the entirety of the Buddha’s teachings, is usually
referred to as the Four Noble Truths. These truths were the subject of
the Buddha’s first sermon following his enlightenment, and he often
said they were all that he taught his 50 years as a wandering monk. The
Buddha summarized the Four Noble Truths by saying that all his teaching
was about one thing only: ”Suffering and the end of suffering.” The
Four Noble Truths are usually given as 1) The truth of suffering, 2)
The truth of the arising of suffering, 3) The truth of the end of
suffering, and 4) The path to the end of suffering.

The First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, says that the
impermanence of all things is the source of human suffering. The
Buddhist word ”dukkha,” usually translated as ‘’suffering” (and the
source of the mistaken popular notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic
creed) actually connotes not only the ideas of human suffering,
discomfort, and pain, but additionally the ideas of impermanence,
imperfection, emptiness, and void. The Noble Truth of Suffering says
that at the heart of the human experience lies a cosmic seed of
imperfection that we spend our lives trying to understand and heal.

The Second Noble Truth, the truth of the arising of suffering, says
that ignorance is the root of all suffering. More specifically, it says
that ignorance of the present conditions of life — of  ”the way
things are” — sets off a chain of potentially disastrous inner
reactions based on that ignorance: either trying to make permanent what
one likes, or trying to destroy what one dislikes. Either of those
reactions only tightens the grip of desire or aversion, leading people
to devise ever more desperate schemes for release.

The Third Noble Truth, the truth of the end of suffering, says that
an experiential understanding of the way things are, can lead to the
end of suffering. This transcendent wisdom gained through meditation
dissolves suffering as the morning sun evaporates the dew. It’s a
wisdom-in-the-bones, a knowledge of lived experience, and not anything
book-learned or mentally puzzled out. It blooms from within, drawing on
its own depths for nourishment. Suffering ends because wisdom creates
the possibility of action that is smoothly continuous with the
realities of the world.

The Fourth Noble Truth, the path to the end of suffering, is the
Buddha’s great how-to manual of enlightenment. It describes eight steps
that collectively create conditions in which suffering can decrease by
degrees, and finally cease completely. Although the path is usually
described as having eight steps, in essence there are only three, with
each of those three broken down in groupings of three, three, and two
sub-step. The three basic steps are ethical conduct, meditation, and
transforming insight into the way things are. Rather than forming a
stairway that leads to heaven, these three steps and their eight
sub-steps are more like a Mobius Strip that endlessly leaves, travels,
and arrives in the here and now. One can start anywhere on the path, or
choose to follow any step at any time, or several or all of them all at
once, and always arrive at the same place. The Noble Eightfold Path, as
the path to the end of suffering is usually called, truly describes
more of a place than a path, with the place being the present, a
boundary-less orb without coordinates in which all things happen
everywhere all the time. To phrase it this way is to advance to the end
of the teaching at the speed of light, so take it as you will. The
basic point is that the Noble Eightfold Path leads a person to a direct
experience of the way things are, which is the solvent of ignorance,
which is the path to the end of suffering.

The Noble Eightfold Path is usually shown schematically as:

The essential logic of the path is that virtuous action in the world
creates a foundation for fruitful individual meditation, and that
individual meditation creates a foundation for the arising of wisdom in
a soul. A virtuous circle leading to the end of suffering can thus be
started by entering the path at any point. Yet, within this virtuous
cycle, Right Speech stands at an especially critical point, which is
the line proceeding from wisdom towards virtue. Right Speech  lies
right at the point where the wholesome soul developed through
meditation, decides to express itself in the world. The very first such
expression, the Buddha says, is speech that will either spread the
peace achieved by meditation into the world or, if unskillfully spoken,
will assuredly achieve just the opposite effect.

BARRE,
MASSACHUSETTS — Here are some notes on a one-day session on Right
Speech — i.e., the Buddhist guidelines on how to speak in a way that
helps and doesn’t harm — yesterday at the Barre Center for Buddhist
Studies here. Sharon Salzberg, one of the three founders of the Insight
Meditation Society, just up the road from the BCBS in Barre, led the
session.

A small flyer for the session drew a crowd of 90 from all throughout
the northeast and, in my case, Minnesota. The morning was spent almost
entirely in meditation, and the afternoon about half, leaving only
about one-quarter of the time for discussion about Right Speech. But
interestingly enough, that seemed like just the right amount. To have
spent more time talking a would have seemed like chatter. That fact in
itself, I thought, said a lot about Right Speech.

Simply knowing that the session was about Right Speech also made
Sharon’s meditation instructions resonate in a pointed way towards
lessons about ethical speech, and how one might achieve it. There were
even points of contact with specific journalism words and ideas. For
example:

1. Pay attention to your breath, like a friend in a crowd.
2. Meditation is healing because it is centering of a scattered and distracted mind, and integrating
3. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment without the intrusion of bias
4. Concentration is a platform for mindfulness
5. Meditation is about relationship, first of all our relationship with what arises within ourselves
6. The key to distinguishing positive from negative speech or action is intention, and we need mindfulness to know our intention

Then there was this four-point series of comments from Sharon to start the afternoon:

1. We cannot control what arises in our minds. But if we are mindful it’s not after we send the email.
2. Being aware of what we are feeling is really important.
3. We blame ourselves for what arises in our minds, as though we can control it.
4. Relating skillfully to what arises in our minds is the whole project.

Sharon offered this interesting definition of mindfulness to set the stage for her analysis of Right Speech:

"We generally react in one of two ways to strong negative feelings
that arise in us. One is to get lost in it, fixated with it. We can do
100 good things in a day, but that one bad thing that we did, we spend
all evening or all week remembering it, dwelling on it, worrying about
it, blaming ourselves for it. We can get fixated and obsessed with
feeling. The other way to react to strong feelings is to have aversion
which can take two forms — anger, which is the outgoing, expressive
form of aversion, and fear, which is the ingoing, frozen form of
aversion. We can try to block out negative feelings, crazily trying
everything we can think of to avoid it, block it out, not feel it. But
there is a third way, which neither gets lost in negative feeling, nor
becomes fearful and angry. That third way relates to negative feeling
neutrally, neither pushing it away or getting lost inside it. That
middle ground is mindfulness."

The key to Right Speech, Salzberg said, is "to know our intentions
before we speak, and to know our intentions we need mindfulness. This
middle ground I’ve described is very subtle, but it’s a ground we
cultivate in meditation." As an example, she asked people to imagine a
time when they may have felt the urge to gossip. "You can feel it
rising up inside you, right?" she said. The key then is just to notice
that feeling but, at least at first, to neither act on it nor to
piously push it away. Rather, just to be with the feeling for a while,
noticing how it feels and what happens to the feeling over time. And as
you wait, start a new line of thought along the lines of "will saying
what I have the urge to say right now, really serve my goals in
relationship with this person and in my life?" If the answer is "yes,"
go ahead, but if the answer is "no," you haven’t said anything to that
point so there’s a gain to staying quiet.

That boils down to a two-step strategy to attempting Right Speech:

1. Pay attention to intention
2. Ask ‘What do I want?’

Starting both the morning and afternoon sessions, Sharon made this
point: "These questions are not easy. The moral dimensions are subtle
and complex. It’s not easy, and that’s okay. One hallmark of the
enlightened life is real engagement with things that are not easy.
Remember, also, it can feel creative. If we can feel that we are using
our lives as a creative medium, rather than ‘I gossiped, I’m so bad,’
that’s a positive path, rather than a sense of right and wrong that is
punishing.

"Speech is so powerful yet so ephemeral compared to action. A word
said 20 years ago can still resound. These questions are a kind of
training which implies imperfection."

She elaborated a bit on the notion of intention: "The reason it is
so powerful is that its where the energy of a communication really
lies. Intention contains the karmic seed of communication."

She said that the Buddha had summarized his instructions on Right Speech to a simple dictum: "Say what is true and useful."

I found her elaboration on the notion of "usefulness" especially
interesting. Mindfulness usually implies a pause before speech in which
to ask not only "What do I want?" but "What would be useful to say in
this situation?" And this has two elements to it — first, what is
useful to you, and second, what is useful to the person you are
addressing. Therefore Sharon said: "There is mutual inner and outer
awareness at the same time in order to determine the best action or
speech."

She acknowledged the difficulties: "Can you be mindful of every
word? No. But we can be aware of the waves of emotion and feeling that
relates to intention."

Then she said something really interesting: "There are three aspects
to every action or speech. There is the intention behind it, there is
the skillfullness of the action, and there is the immediate response to
the action. We tend to ground our identities only in the third aspect,
and to ignore the first two. Yet the first two are by far the most
important. Plus there is also a longterm response to a communication
that we also usually fail to take into account." Right Speech, she
suggested, takes all these aspects fully into account — at least as
best one can under the circumstances — ahead of each action.

She told a funny story about a group of friends who are working
their way through reading foundational Buddhist texts, and recently had
gotten to the section on Right Speech. It seems this material has had a
kind of silencing impact on them, that it’s made them scrutinize what
they say so minutely, that they find they have less and less to say.
"They are a bit worried," Sharon said, "that finally all they will be
saying to each other is ‘it’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’" I know what
those folks are going through, or growing through. This Spring, at a
retreat, I heard my teacher repeat a famous Right Speech direction:
"Don’t speak unless you can improve on silence." That’s a damn hard
standard to reach!

Sharon made an interesting comment about listening, which started
with the standard thing people say but then became richer: "Listening
is the key to good communication. When you listen well you are
listening to yourself as well as them, especially to your reactions,
thoughts, patterns and so on." To which I would only add, it’s perhaps
not listening so much, which suggests an auditory thing, as being
aware, which opens consciousness towards all senses and in all
directions.

I found almost the most fascinating part of the day was listening to
the questions and comments that people made. They showed me
conclusively that the grappling I’m doing with this topic in my
professional life — trying to figure out what in a journalist’s life
qualifies as Right Speech — is equally shared by many people in all
areas of life. Several people spoke about their constant urge to
gossip, not knowing what to do with it. One woman says she often finds
herself with her husband, wanting to share something gossipy with him.
"Then I ask myself, do I tell him because I want my significant other
to know what’s going on with me, or do I want to tell him just because
it’s a juicy disaster? Or maybe I should just shut up about the whole
thing?"

Another woman talked about wanting to gossip as being "an
unconscious attempt to bond" with others and said if she stopped
gossiping, she’d have nothing to talk about with her friends. Sharon
then drew a distinction between gossip that was harmful, such as
spreading rumors about other people, and idle talk, such as what was
going to happen on a favorite TV show that night. And she acknowledged
that sometimes, gossiping "is how our communities are formed." That
last bit really intrigued me and I want to think about it further. On
the one hand, I really understand it, and newspapers and journalism of
many forms has long used gossipy items that become "water cooler" talk,
social currency. But it’s worth asking, what kind of a community is
formed, when it’s formed on the basis of malicious gossip or related
forms of talk? Surely, not a healthy and positive community. This is
one area for thinking more in a journalistic vein, combining ethical
speculation for example with James Carey’s discussion of journalism as
the conversation of a democracy and, further, a kind of
community-forming ritualistic speech.

Another woman presented this dilemma: "At home I live with people
who talk constantly about the Bush administration in the harshest and
most negative terms. Not that I disagree with that, but their talk is
so nonstop, bitter, and toxic. I just want to scream. It wouldn’t be so
bad if once in a while they got up and did something, but they never
do, they just bitch and gripe and moan."

And several people mentioned a kind of Catch 22 they had gotten
into, vis a vis speech, as children, that decades later they are still
trying to escape from as adults. One woman said she was the
self-appointed truth-teller in her family, always taking pains to
declare the elephant in the room that no one was speaking about. But
she paid the price in terms of being ostracized, she felt, from her
parents’ affection and from the social life of the family, that left
her out of talk and activities as a result. In discussion with Sharon,
it came out that she felt anger at her parents for keeping important
topics taboo — things that were hurting the family every day — and
that this anger fueled not only her truth-telling as a child but also
her attitudes and habits on communication to this day. "Anger is often
a useful fuel for speech, such as truth telling, but there is some
danger in being so close to that anger all the time."

At one point in the afternoon, I had what seemed to me a kind of
epiphany that might help me escape the journalistic bind that I am now
in, in which sometimes I don’t even want to publish my best stuff,
writing that I think — that I know — is really good, because I just
don’t want to add to the amount of verbiage in the world. Not to
mention my concern whether my speech is ethical or not.

The epiphany was that I realized that in the story of the Buddha’s
life, in the days after he was enlightened, he seriously considered not
saying anything about what he’d learned, to anyone. He knew that he was
going to be misunderstood, or not understood, by most people, and he
figured maybe it was just best to live out his days in enlightened,
silent, peace. But he changed his mind when some higher spirit
approached him and convinced him that some people — a minority, but
some — would understand his message, so on that basis he should go
ahead and speak. And so he spoke.

Not that I’m enlightened, that’s for sure, but the Buddha’s model
for at least having pondered staying silent, but then deciding just to
go forth and do his best — knowing ahead of time it wouldn’t always be
enough and indeed sometimes would be direly misunderstood — seems to
me a great model to follow.

Especially considering the alternative, i.e. the biggest case of writer’s block of all time.

I  often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply,
systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action
and effects of their chosen medium of expression — language.

Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a
conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often
aren’t aware of the full range of impact their language is actually
having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.

Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers
of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of
the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and
bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy,
authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to
persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and
a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.

This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion
journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in
journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting,
similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and
journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as
non-fiction literature; and so on.

My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of
journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language
ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as
regards its application to journalism and the media.

That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a
bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any
specific language message, and which plays a key role in the
development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or
even, one might say, of soul.

Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western
tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from
Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant,
Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.

What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has
exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has
on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a
thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed.
Who is doing it?

No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken
language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers
and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract
through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV
screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and
seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly — because it could be no
other way — the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all
these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and
ideas and feelings.

But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our
communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic,
Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and
written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again,
where is the debate?

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development
of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human
faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and
weaken social bonds. Buddha’s doctrine of Right Speech posits that
using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link
between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual
meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the
world.

Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and
updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief
among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to
civic aims.

A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice,
and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating
such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such
as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and
television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly
mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational
conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music,
advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their
entertainment and communication services. 

And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these
behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance,
as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed
to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow
journalists, above all workers in today’s media communication fields,
to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here
proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply
the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual
practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.

From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of
mass communication on government and civic society and individuals
today, it’s truly a mystery why language’s moral essence has never been
systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is
such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap
between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of
language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.

Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with,
say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact
of language on self and community. ”Sticks and stones may break my
bones, but words will never hurt me,” we intone as we launch into yet
another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and
angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute
discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.

It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we
are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim.
And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this
type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use
of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our
journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit
into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?

The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media
and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic
moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high
stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor
of food.

We speak about ourselves as media ”consumers” who ”ingest” a
”daily diet” of news and entertainment. We face a ”menu” of media
choices, ranging perhaps from ”dry” or ”lean” or ”unpalatable”
programs at one end, to ”meaty” or ”yummy” or ”rich” programs at
the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ”guilty pleasure” like
eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The
Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like
”eating one’s spinach.”

A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to
a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue
yet one that humanity’s greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.

One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner
nourishes the physical body, what kind of ”body invisible” does
language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?

The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly
claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even
less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such
as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that
such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that
describing the body invisible transcends language itself.

The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.

”Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am
there,” says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that
he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is
our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the
same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso,
four limbs and interior organs that we call our  ”physical” selves.

But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of
detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible,
by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the
world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we
look within.

Charts showing ”chakras” and ”meridians” and ”auras,” the best
ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But
even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don’t
divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is
essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of
feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching
that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a
infinite ocean.

At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers
of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly
take to be ”us,” lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all
energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to
this.

”Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,”
the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and
similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin
to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the
human soul.

We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does
one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language
in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?

To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds.
After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the
physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types
of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various
physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these
are all quite precisely known and even visualized.

We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.

Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate
realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway).
Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting
of language to masses of people — thereby either nourishing or
poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as
may be — is an especially urgent task.

We need to get started.