Written a couple of months after the 6^th Annual Globalisation for the Common Good Conference held in Istanbul July 2007, I would like to take the opportunity to fold into this particular presentation of my argument valuable feedback garnered at that meeting.      

I began my Istanbul paper by stating my belief that if we are serious about making ours a truly interfaith perspective on ‘Globalisation for the Common Good’ then we are obliged to consider and engage the dharmic religions – notably Buddhism and Hinduism, but also Confucianism and Taoism among others. Indeed, the paper I presented at the conference, entitled ‘Three Poisons: A Buddhist Perspective on Globalisation for the Common Good’, was one of only a handful dealing explicitly with any of these traditions[^2].

Admittedly, seekers after progressive social change, and even those of us engaged with the ‘Globalisation for the Common Good’ movement, may feel uneasy at the introduction of Buddhism into the discourse of social justice, wary of being charged with emotionality, idealism or recourse to exoticism in the face of ‘real issues’.

It is my contention, however, that the contribution of a dharmic perspective could not be more important. By way of an exemplification of the ‘three poisons’ I want to show that Buddhism offers some highly instructive and, I hope, constructive, critical themes that we might bring to our understanding of the social and economic structures that are creating and perpetuating suffering the world over. 

Introduction

We often evaluate today’s world of globalisation by talking about the need for “social justice”and the state’s role in “distributive justice.” Yet this emphasis, so important in the discourse of the Abrahamic religions, is not found in traditional Buddhism. Rather - as recentlly articulated by prominent Western Buddhist scholar David Loy, for example[3] - the Buddhist path seeks to eliminate social exploitation by consciously transforming the ‘three poisons’ of personal suffering into their positive counterparts: greed into generosity, ill-will into loving-kindness, and delusion into wisdom.

On this understanding the transformation of the ‘three poisons’ is the fundamental basis for cultivating compasssionate understanding - karuna. Thus we might say that the Buddhist antitode to exploitative social systems is personal or individual rational awareness, ultimately manifesting unconditional kindness and compassion for all.

So, marrying the political arguments of contemporary commentators of social justice with a consideration of the ‘three poisons’ of Buddhism, this paper seeks to demonstrate the nature and importance of karuna for ‘Globalisation for the Common Good’ discourse.

Compassionate understanding and the discourse of progressive social change

Arguably, many contemporary commentators on issues of  social justice are determinedly compassionate in their desire or intention to relieve suffering. Yet, the term ‘compassion’ itself is rarely invoked, articulated or discussed, even by writers and activists prominent in this kind of discourse, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman or John Pilger, for example. In contrast, the whole thrust of Buddhism is to examine, understand, articulate and cultivate compassion consciously and maximally. It does so on a basis of profoundly rational foundations and offers a wealth of insight into the nature of greed, hatred and delusion on which all forms of social injustice are based. On this point David Edwards, in The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism, provides an apposite comment:

In my view it is compassion that marks the difference between mainstream and dissent, between the cliches of conformity and liberating insight, between a murderous status quo and change, between despair and hope…Recognizing this great value of compassionate understanding, Buddhism takes us in all our laughable self-importance, greediness and irascability, and declares that even we can work on ourselves to increase our compassion…In the process, we are told, we will experience freedom (from greed, fear, hatred and delusions)…[4]

It is the contention of this paper that the scholarly investigation of this very perspective (involving the transformation of the ‘three poisons’) combined with the analysis of social justice commentators, suggests a response to the everyday suffering inherent in a Western mindset rooted in violence, economically and morally. Furthermore, by bringing together an appreciation of the implications of a dharmic perspective with the social concerns expressed by writers such as those mentioned above, we can, I hope, usefully expand the horizon of ‘Globalisation for the Common Good’ discourse. 

In a published series of dialogues entitled Global Civilisation: A Buddhist-Islamic Dialogue, and within the context of discussing human rights discourse and the hubris of the Enlightenment project, Daisaku Ikeda and Majid Tehranian draw out a theme important to this contention:

Tehranian:	We still need a … [generation to] move the focus away from human rights onto human caring and compassion. It would mean shifting discourse from rights to responsibilities, from legal precepts to social obligations, from the letter of the law to the spirit of the law, from minds to hearts.
Ikeda	Myself feel that the discourse on human rights…is now approaching the level of the teachings of the worlds religions, includng Shakyamuni’s idea of compassion. Let me relate an anecdote…One day Shakyamuni encounters a sick person. He bathes the person’s body with a cloth, washes the dirty bedding, and dries it in the sun. Shakyamuni then tells huis disciples that, “Helping the sick is the same thing as serving the Buddha.”
Tehranian:	What the sutra is saying, then, is that compassion does not mean giving alms or doing something charitable from someone below you, but acting for that person out of a feeling of respect.
Ikeda:	Because to show compassion is to venerate the Buddha, if anything it expresses a sense of doing service for someone greater than yourself. In Buddhism, therefore, an altruistic act is considered a practice that elevates oneself.
Tehranian:	That makes a lot of sense. It really is a noble way of thinking…[5]

As the sutra recounted in the above dialogue represents, Buddhism is concerned first and foremost with the everyday and everyday-suffering; in a world of globalizing, self-interested greed, Buddhism holds at it’s foundation: “Whatever joy there is in this world / All comes from desiring others to be happy / And whatever suffering there is in this world / All comes from desiring myself to be happy”.[6]  This brings us to the notion of the transformation of the ‘three poisons’ and its implications for an interfaith perspective on ‘Globalisation for the Common Good’.

The transformation of the ‘three poisons’

How might the Buddhist notion of the ‘three fires’, popularised as the ‘three poisons’, broaden (and perhaps deepen) the discourse of  ‘Globalisation for the Common Good’? In pursuing this question we will be guided by the obvious interrogative of how Buddhist teachings from another time, culture and intellectual language, taught in an age of localized social and economic interactions, might relate to the highly complex and increasingly globalised world in which we now live?

Often anglicised as ‘The Fire Sermon’, the Adittapariyaya Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya XXXV, 28) is a discourse of the Pali Canon. In it, Gautama Buddha puts his view that born existence is on fire - inherently painful, burning, or driven by desire - but the fire is not necessary and can be cooled or ultimately quenched. This image of the ‘coolness’ that ultimately quenches the fire is the central meaning of nibbana (nirvana, in Sanskrit) in Buddha’s philosophy.

Thus, Buddha’s argument is devoted to convincing us of the existence of this fire and motivating us to put it out; and his method for cooling the fire took the form of a number of instructive arguments and techniques. In a generalised formulation we might summarize Gautama Buddha’s ‘Fire Sermon’ as arguing that we suffer, and cause others to suffer (dukkha), because of our own greed, hatred and ignorance (The ‘three fires’ or ‘three poisons’ are also variously translated as “desire, aversion, illusion” etc.).

Furthermore, we might say that the Buddha’s teaching for overcoming this effect involves a transformation of these ‘three fires’ or ‘three poisons’, having first recognised their existence. This would entail, for example, transforming our greed into generosity, our hatred into loving-kindness, and our ignorance into wisdom; as is certainly the popularised interpretation. But what does such a teaching imply about the global societal situation we now find ourselves in?

The argument of David Loy, in an article in Tikkun magazine[7] entitled ‘The Three Poisons, Institutionalized’, is that the Buddhist principle of the ‘three poisons’ can help us to understand the connection between our collective selves and collective dukkha,  where “our present economic system institutionalizes greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill-will, and our corporate media institutionalize delusion…the problem is not only that the three poisons operate collectively but that they have taken on a life of their own. Today it is crucial for us to wake up and face the implications of these three institutionalized poisons.” Taking Loy’s point we might posit that while dharma practice traditionally focuses on transforming the poisons in the individual, the problem today is complicated by the institutionalisaton of the ‘poisons’, equally in need of transformation. 

As Stephen Batchelor writes of Buddhism: “The contemporary social engagement of dharma practice is rooted in awareness of how self-centred confusion and craving can no longer be adequately understood only as psychological drives that manifest themselves in subjective states of anguish. We find these drives embodied in the very economic, military, and political structures that influence the lives of the majority of people on earth.”[8] In a related observation Noam Chomsky finds that the corporate goal “is to ensure that the human beings who [it is] interacting with, you and me, also become inhuman. You have to drive out of people’s heads natural sentiments like care about others, or sympathy, or solidarity... The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another, who don’t care about anyone else... whose conception of themselves, their sense of value, is ‘Just how many created wants can I satisfy?’”[9]

And as Vandana Shiva writes in an online article titled ‘Globalisation and its Fallout’: “The fundamentalism of the market and the fundamentalism of ideologies of hate and intolerance are rooted in fear - fear of the other, fear of the capacity and creativity of the other, fear of the sovereignty of the other. We are witnessing the worst expressions of organized violence of humanity against humanity because we are witnessing the wiping out of philosophies of inclusion, compassion and solidarity. This is the highest cost of globalization - it is destroying our very capacity to be human. Rediscovering our humanity is the highest imperative to resist and reverse this inhuman project. The debate on globalization is not about the market or the economy. It is about remembering our common humanity. And the danger of forgetting the meaning of being human.”[10]

What comes through in these analyses is that today's global consumer culture nurtures the ‘three poisons’ of greed, hatred and ignorance on both an individual and collective level. As such, the ‘three poisons’ can be found to be to some extent present in every human being, but reflected in, and also encouraged by, our institutions and structures. 

So, in search of a response to “disassociation” and the “destruction of our capacity to be human”, a Buddhist perspective highlights two interrelated phenomena. One, that  

the ultimate source of the imbalance in the distribution of the world’s resources and the violence to which this imbalance gives rise (“the cost of globalization”) is rooted in the individual human tendency to the ‘three poisons’ of greed, hatred and ignorance. Two, that the ‘three poisons’ have become institutionalised in our political, economic and media structures which now depend upon the promotion the same (in the individual) for their survival.

In this way a Buddhist perspective leads us to see that what we should respond to, and how we should respond, begins with the very acknowledgement of the existence of the ‘three poisons’ at a personal, individual level and at an institutional and collective, societal level; hence, both aspects of the phenomena need to be tackled simultaneously.

As Pankaj Mishra in his recent book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World argues: “I began to see…what the Buddha had stressed to the helpless people caught in the chaos of his own time: how the mind, where desire, hatred and delusion run rampant, creating the glories and defeats of the past as well as the hopes for the future, and the possibility for endless suffering, is also the place - the only one - where human beings can have full control of their lives”[11]. Again, this suggests that a Buddhist response to globalisation begins with everyone truly practicing to understand himself or herself.

The imperative of such a Buddhist response is articulated by bell hooks in an interview in the July 2006 issue of Shambala Sun: “Great moments for social justice have occurred…but these movements have also been deeply flawed, in that they could not sustain themselves.” She continues: “What’s needed is a Buddha-like process of self-actualizing that spreads into the political world…We know from Buddhism, if we look for the end, we will despair and not sustain our efforts. But if we see it as a continual process of awakening then we can move forward.”[12] Thus only on this basis, grounded in a recognition that we are all, as individuals, part of and responsible for, the collective, can we then actively work together to transform the ‘three poisons’ at that level. Mishra writes, “ultimately this kind of deepening and ethicizing of everyday life was part of the Buddha’s bold and original response to the intellectual and spiritual crisis…[of his] time. In much of what he said and did he addressed the suffering of human beings deprived of old consolations of faith and community - human beings adrift in the world.”[13]

Indeed, the nature of the response suggested here clearly involves much self-awareness and honesty and introspection, but perhaps above it all it requires the slow erosion of our naive faith in selfish living as a viable source of personal happiness - motivated by the understanding that, surely, in the last analysis, it is our own willful ignorance, empowered by our own greed and hatred, that fuel systemic, institutional greed and hatred.

Strange though it might sound then, the Buddhist teaching of the ‘three poisons’ leads us to see that despite or rather because of the ruthless and violent nature of the system facing us, the only realistic individual, social and political antidote to Batchelor’s “self-centred confusion”, Chomksy’s “created wants” or Vandana Shiva’s “inhuman project”, to our “collective dukkha”, is the kind of personal radical awareness required to bring about a transformation of the ‘poisons’ - in ourselves and ultimately in our structures and institutions.

Although we Westerners may find this naive or idealistic, presumably not many of us can claim to do so on the basis of personal experience. Can we honestly say that such radical personal awareness is at the heart of our own response to the manifest destructive side of globalisation?

ENDNOTES

[1] This paper is an edited version of a paper presented at the 6th Annual Interfath Perspective on Globalisation for the Common Good Conference series, held at Fatih University, Istanbul (July 8th , 2007)   and was written for a general audience. Excerpts have also appeared in Interreligious Insight.

[2] From the 2006 meeting see David L. Coleman, Buddhist Peace Practice: Śūnyatā, Wisdom and Compassion, http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/jgcg/2006/fa06/jgcg-fa06-coleman.htm

[3] See David Loy in The Great Awakening: A Buddhistic Social Theory, Wisdom Publications, Boston 2003; or http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1529/37/

[4] David Edwards, The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism, Green Books, Devon, 1998, P.11.

[5] Daisaku Ikeda and Majid Tehranian, Global Civilisation: A Buddhist – Islamic Dialogue, British Academic Press, London, 2000, pp. 117-118.

[6] Aryasura, The Marvellous Companion, Jatakamala: Life Stories of the Buddha, Dharma Publishing, 1983, P.65.

[7] http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0706/frontpage/poisons

[8]Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs – A Contemporary Guide To Awakening, Bloomsbury, 1997, P. 112.

[9] Quoted in Joel Bakan, The Corporation, Constable, 2004, pp.134-135.

[10] http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-03/23shiva.cfm

[11] Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: Buddhism in the World, Picador, 2004, P.402.

[12] Quoted, bell hooks in ‘Love Fights the Power’ by Barry Boyce Shambhala Sun, July 2006, pp.57 & 96.

[13] Mishra, P.403.