[Music] Hello everybody, welcome back to the Buddhist Center podcast with me, Candradasa. It's a delight to be back in the flow of things with a whole set of new episodes. If you're just tuning in and you haven't heard us for a while, go back and check the archive. We've had some fantastic stuff recently with Buddhism and AI, talking about mindfulness and imagination, of other themes. It's a podcast from the Triangla Buddhist community, really about people's lives, about the stories that make up
their lives and what the practice of Buddhism means in our lives. We're not really as much interested in telling you about Buddhism as we are in showing you how Buddhists live, how Buddhists love, what they bring the best part of their worlds to. And I'm very happy to be introducing this episode. You've probably seen the title, right, if you're listening to this. Maybe some of you are politics wonks. Some people run a mile when they come across Politics, but this episode on Buddhism and Politic
s is one that's been gestating for a little while and it's just kind of come together as an episode. And rather than get into a big set up for it, I'm just going to bring in our guests to start the conversation and I'll come back at the end and say a few more things. But first of all, I want to welcome Dharmachari Vishwapani, who recent listeners would know from the episode on Mindfulness and Imagination. Welcome back Vishwapani, this is an unexpected pleasure to have you back again. Well, it's
very good to be back. I'm at my home in Cardiff. And I'm also going to say hello to Vajratara, my old friend Vajratara, who... Is this the second time? Have you done one before? I'm not sure that I have done one before, actually. I've got a memory of us doing one somewhere, but maybe not. Maybe I just dreamt it. I don't know. It's all like doing a very friendly chat with you, so I can't distinguish it in my mind whether I'm doing a podcast or just chatting to an old friend. Well, either way, it'
s totally delightful to have you. Welcome to the podcast. Do you want to say a bit about where you are? Yeah, I'm at T. Ratna Loka Retreat Centre and it's where women train for ordination within Europe. So I'm here in Wales but we are looking to move to a bigger premises, hopefully next year. Super exciting. And last but definitely not least, I'm really delighted to welcome Loka Bandhu back to the podcast. The most devoted listeners to this podcast will know that the very first episode, absolute
ly yonks ago, at least 10 years ago, was Loka Bandhu and I walking down a lane together in rural Norfolk, holding our phones a bit giggly late at night, recording the first ever episode of this podcast. And here we are all these years later, 400 something episodes later. Welcome back Lokabandhu, where are you? That's very nice of you to remember that Chandradarsa. It's strange because I've completely forgotten it. But what I remember is doing an audio boo with you in the middle of a frozen lake
at night up in Scotland, down at Kosha Retreat Centre. That's right. made a little bonfire out in the middle of the frozen lake many years ago again. Anyway, I'm at my home in Glastonbury and very happy to be joining you today. Great to have you back, Lokaman, and great to remember that I'd forgotten about the frozen lake. We did actually go and stand in the middle of a frozen lake in the pitch dark the night the Triratna Buddhist community changed its name from the Friends of the Western Buddhi
st Order to the Triratna Buddhist Order and community, and we went and had a conversation about that in the deep dark of the Scottish Highlands. It was fantastic. I think that episode's up there so maybe you can listen to it. Anyway, here we are to talk with these good people about Buddhism and politics. Buddhism and politics is one of these subjects that can really exercise people and I just wanted to reassure you if you're listening that you're not going to be hearing something particularly pa
rtisan. We're not really interested so much in views as it were here as we are in just how this area impacts our lives together as people trying to practice the Dharma in the 21st century. But the podcast was occasioned by something specific. I'm going to invite you, Vishal Pani, to just walk us into this conversation. You wrote a piece for our friends at Tricycle online about Buddhism and politics with a very particular angle. You and I have been talking about this for ages in the background, b
ut it's great to be having the conversation in public today. So why don't you set the scene for us? How did you come to write that article? V.P. So the starting point for my article, which has appeared in Tricycle Buddhist Review, is the very strange fact to me and I think everyone I speak to in the Buddhist world, that Suwela Brabhaman is both a Mitra of the Triratna Buddhist community and the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom. And this has never happened before. It's never happened in our c
ommunity that we've had someone so prominent in the political sphere. In fact, it's never happened anywhere in in the Western Buddhist world. So Tricycle is a general American Buddhist magazine and I approached them about this and they were very interested. And the reason I approached them was that it seemed like it was almost impossible for anyone in Triratna to say anything publicly about this particular phenomenon of having the Home Secretary as someone who's connected to our community. And w
e couldn't do anything officially. That would be wrong, I think, but I thought I could write something personally because watching her career, having met her just once about seven years ago, I had really reflected on who she was, what she stood for, and all sorts of issues arising about Buddhism and politics from that. So I decided I would write a personal reflection on politics. And the other thing to say about Suella Brafman is she's not just any politician. a particularly controversial one. S
omewhere situated on the right of the Conservative Party, I think that's fair to say, and someone who declares herself as very exercised about culture war issues. So the issues on the right of politics around culture war include strong feelings about immigration, and as the Home Secretary she's responsible for that area, and also criticism of changes that get criticised, and there are big inverted commas around this next word woke, things like trans rights and that sort of thing. She's one of th
ose people who are very critical of those sorts of changes. So clearly, it seems to me, that raises lots and lots of questions. Yeah, thanks, Vishapani. That's a nice little summary of the, in a way, pretty intriguing context that we share. It's probably well to be clear at this point, if you're listening and you don't really know our community, or you don't know how these things work, Soheila Braverman is not a member of the Trinidad Buddhist Order and she doesn't look to or seek to represent o
r speak for our community in any way. And also as a community we're not really interested in talking about her and dissecting her political views and getting into all of that. I've got a question Vishwapani around the ethical side of you deciding to write that article. I know you thought about it really carefully, which is a testament to your own practice as a Buddhist. Why did you decide in the end that it was really important to say something rather than just have your own perspective on it an
d have interesting conversations with people in private? Why was there a public element to this? Well, first of all, I am someone who writes and talks and broadcasts about the relationship between Buddhism and society. So for 17 years now, I've been broadcasting on Thought for the Day, which is a very high profile sort of religious talk slot and primetime on UK radio. So that's always about connecting items in the news to Buddhist teachings. So that's led me to think a lot about that and I'm als
o involved in advocating mindfulness. So for me, and this goes right back to my own upbringing and childhood, changing society is an important value. The sense that Buddhism has something to say to our society and should be informing, should be having an effect. That's really something that I really care about. And here we have someone who's been involved in our community, not so actively involved now as I understand it, who has a lot of influence, in fact a great deal of power, and using it in
a way that I can't recognise really in Buddhist terms. So this has naturally raised lots of questions among people within our community. Of course some people agree with her politically, many people disagree with her politically, because on the whole our Buddhist community, other Buddhist communities tends to slant left. I think that's a fair generalisation. And so of course people want to know what's going on and what we, quotes, think about it. I don't think we can say anything, but I can. As
an individual, I can. And I didn't want to say it in a tree-ratner setting. This is the closest I've come really. So I chose to say it somewhere independent as part of that general discourse about Buddhism in the West. Yeah, so I hear that you thought you could say something personally. I know that you worked on this article for quite a while before it was published. Did your approach evolve as you worked on it? Did your perspective change at all as you began to kind of grapple with how to speak
about this skillfully, balancing up all of these very difficult tensions that are there? I think the challenge in writing the article was separating out my own views about politics and society from a Buddhist view of this particular situation that we're talking about. And actually doing Thought for the Day on the radio makes me do this ten times a year because it has to be non-partisan. But when it comes to this particular case, Suella Braverman, I have very strong feelings about some of the th
ings I see her doing, very strong disagreements. And that raises the question for me, are those disagreements personal? Are they ethical? Are they political or are they Buddhist? And my general approach is thinking that Buddhism is neither left-wing nor right-wing. It's just not talking on that level. Buddhists tend to assume that because their politics express their values, I'm a compassionate person, therefore I think left-wing policies are compassionate and therefore they're Buddhist policies
. We tend to equate our personal views with our politics. And I've realised, and it's actually quite hard to unravel one's opinions in this way, that I can't make that claim for my own politics. And that raises the question of what then are the issues that one can speak about from a Buddhist perspective? And what the issues that are raised by the way that Suella Braverman conducts herself that are relevant, where you can actually make a Buddhist point that isn't just a political point? The area
that I really focus on in the article is about what we do in a context which is polarised. A term for that polarisation is 'culture wars' but it has many, many effects and our societies in the West are becoming increasingly polarised. We're losing the capacity to listen to each other. We saw that very clearly in relation to Brexit. Now I I don't think the Buddha had a view on whether the UK should or should not be part of the EU. I do, personally, and you can probably guess what it was, if you k
now anything about my attitudes and conditioning. But it's not a Buddhist view. And yet, something happened in that discourse around Brexit that was deeply polarising in our country. And I see this happening in the US, where it seems to have gone much further and been much worse, and actually all around the world, we're losing the capacity to listen. So it seems to me that a really important value and priority for Buddhists in the public sphere is to support listening and not to use polarising l
anguage. So that in the end is my criticism of Zuella Braverman, that she does use polarising language and I think that is a legitimately Buddhist criticism. It's very interesting, isn't it, where speech and views sort of merge into action and ethical conduct and those kinds of questions. And I think that's one of the things you're very even-handed about in your article. It's a very properly accommodating look at the complexity of this. I'm interested in what it's like to read the article. I've
read it a few times now. I find rich pickings there to think about. What about you, Lokabandhu? What was your response to reading this piece in terms of your own involvement with politics and your personal life and its relationship to your Buddhist practice. I've also read the article a few times. There's certainly a lot of food for thought there. I think as a community we are kind of in uncharted waters. It's the first time we've had a senior politician as part of our community and able to make
a difference in the way that Vishvapani speaks about. I personally hope it's not the last. I'd love us to have a Buddhist Prime Minister. I mean, why not? Because Buddhists do want to change the world as well as change themselves, hopefully change the world for the better. But then it begs the question, what do we expect of any individuals who get into such a position such as Swallow Braverman has? And I think reading the article, I would agree with Vishwapani that you can't legislate that a Bu
ddhist politician should have certain policies, A, B, C, but I think what you can say is that if somebody wants to claim to be a Buddhist, that there are certain values or principles that are non-negotiable. You can't be a Buddhist and miss out mindfulness for instance, or wisdom or compassion. And so you'd want to see those in the person's life and speech and actions, even if they have policies you don't personally agree with. There should be some sort of ability to track back their policies to
those Buddhist values if they want to claim to be a Buddhist politician. And I think speech is particularly important because words have consequences, don't they? One that I particularly like to raise, I think, is empathy, the speech, but it's also just the ability or the need as a politician to put yourself in others' shoes. >>LW: Yeah, I do agree with Lokabandhu there. I did get an early draft of Vishwavapani's article and did watch some of the discussion around that before he came up with hi
s final draft. And I think what really interested me was the inherent problem of not being able to come up with specifically Buddhist policies, that in a way you have to look at someone's ethical practice rather than saying this policy is Buddhist and this one isn't. And I really valued what he said about the practice of the speech precepts. Going back over what the Buddha said about this area, he focused much more on who a leader should be and how a leader should practice, rather than exactly w
hat policies they should undertake. And I suppose that's important for us as Buddhists. Loko Bandhu asked the question, what do we expect those individuals in politics to be like? And I think we've got quite clear guidelines for that within the Buddhist tradition, particularly with the Buddhist ethical precepts, which Vishvapani drew our attention to in terms of the speech precepts. But then you've got a paradox because it's very hard to get ahead in politics without sacrificing your integrity i
n some way, your ethical integrity. So I don't know. It's interesting, Loka Bandy saying, "Oh, it'd be great to have a Buddhist prime minister," which sort of raises the question in my mind, is it possible to ever have a Buddhist prime minister? Could anyone be a a Prime Minister if you really did follow the Buddhist ethical precepts. That's an interesting question for you particularly, Lokabende, because aren't you still running for the Mayor of Glastonbury as a position? Is that a political po
sition? Is it a non-political position? Well, I was elected as a Greentown Councillor just over a year ago and currently have the honour to be the Deputy Mayor of Glastonbury. But the expectation is next year I'll be Mayor Glastonbury. I'm enjoying it. I'm very much enjoying being connected to my community in all sorts of everyday, mundane, real-life, practical matters. Who's going to empty the litter bins and lock up the toilets at night and water the hanging baskets kind of thing. But also som
e more principal matters about what to do about all the travellers who pitch up and camp in caravans on the edge of town. That is one of our polarising issues. But I think so far, at least at the moment, our politics are quite well-mannered and respectful and non-polarising. There's differences of opinion, but there's no inflammatory language and demonisation, which I think is very poisonous, which you do see when you read the national newspapers about national politics at the moment. I'm aware
of the potential for much more poisonous rhetoric to come in and I'm very grateful that it hasn't at the moment in Glastonbury. [00.22.00] Fadjo Tara, I'm aware that in your work you're encountering women who've decided they're interested in exploring how to centre their life more on Buddhist values, they're pursuing ordination within a Buddhist order. Just in terms of what Vishvapani was saying about Buddhism being neither of the left nor the right, of course people show up with all sorts of vi
ews, all sorts of attitudes to the world. Is that a challenge to get through to people, the culture of not relating to society and to their own lives just in terms of their pre-existing views? Because it's probably a surprise to some people that there are Buddhists whose views tend to be more socially conservative. The clichéd idea of a Buddhist is somebody who's peace-loving and maybe looks a bit like hippie or something like that in people's minds. What's it like to work with just the great fl
ow of beings who show up and are trying to figure this out? Emma Watson I mean the short answer to that is it's wonderful. I find that some of the most stimulating part of my job. So I remember a study group here where we had someone who was quite far to the right, very, very active member of the Tory party. And the same study group, someone who was quite far to the left, would sort of identified at that time as an anarchist and had just come from a hunt saboteur group or event. And they were bo
th in the study group, both training for ordination. And I had to acknowledge within that, not just them and their differences of opinions about things, but also myself. I'm not a neutral observer to this. There's not because I'm a leader in that situation or a Buddhist teacher in that situation, I've suddenly got a view from My father is a journalist. He would describe himself as left from centre. So we've got this whole group with this spectrum of opinions, political opinions, and we've got tw
o weeks together. Two weeks to explore what the Dharma means in that situation. Yeah, and that means something to me as well. And by the end of the retreat, there's some sort of alchemy, some sort of magic, where both people, well, the whole group has a deeper understanding of each other. And I remember one thing that someone said to me once, she said, "You know, we talk about wanting more diversity in Buddhism. Usually what we mean by that is left-wing diversity. But of course, diversity means
a whole range of things, and it's not just diversity within the left wing. It's also including people who feel very, very strongly about a whole range of issues." And we're seeing that more and more. Vishvapani talked about the culture wars, I noticed that the deputy chair of the Tory party said in the UK that the next election will be fought on the lines of culture wars and trans issues. So I think, you know, the public debate was probably going to become more polarised, particularly on certain
issues. And yeah, Local Boundaries is right, we've got to find a way that we can acknowledge our own preferences, acknowledge our own views, and enter into a deeper dialogue with each other about what's truly important. It's wonderful that there is such a range of views in a study group and hopefully that an alchemy does take place but I think for me it would only take place if everyone can see their shared roots in certain shared values such as mindfulness, wisdom, compassion, empathy, truthfu
lness and so on and if they can't see that then you wouldn't have a group of Buddhists speaking together or studying together you'd have a random group of human beings where some alchemy might take place but it wouldn't be quite the same I don't think. One of the things I find myself thinking about with Buddhism and politics is the complexity of what we're dealing with. Society is very complicated and politics is complicated. There are different interpretations of all of the issues we face and t
hen the ways in which political thinking and political instincts operate distorts all of that. Over the years I've thought, particularly when I do Thought for the Day, and I'm confronted with the day's news and I need to make a comment from a Buddhist perspective. Where are the points of genuine linkage? And I think that's where for me as a Buddhist I want to put my efforts. So I'll just mention a couple. One is, you know, Buddhism makes the mind central. We usually think about that in terms of
mental development and spiritual development and so on. But the mind is actually a societal issue. One sign of that is the growing incidence of mental health problems. And Buddhists have something to say to that. So that's one reason why I've got involved with the mindfulness movement, advocating mindfulness as something that can be helping people to take responsibility for their own minds. Now that doesn't just get taught through Buddhist centres, it gets taught through the education system, th
rough the health service. So in those ways it becomes A political issue is not necessarily a partisan political issue. There's a movement in America, I'll mention this to Lokebando, he might be interested, called Mindful Cities, where people like mayors and deputy mayors try to change the ethos of their public services and the culture in their city or their town. So Buddhists actually have quite a lot to say about that. My feeling is we should stick to the things that we know. I mean, now there'
s another area, which is that as Buddhists we learn to think about life in terms of conditionality. We understand that the way things happen is not straightforward, it's not a simple matter of cause and effect, but there's an array of conditions that we need to attend to, both in our inner lives and in the world, and then the future arises out of that. So for me, that speaks to a concern with long-term perspectives rather than short-term benefits such as making a profit. Again, for me, that's th
e basis of a kind of environmental concern, that we care about the long-term health of our planet because we understand that we live in this interconnected world where everything depends on the balance in an array of conditions. So we need to tend to that. Now for me, that is a Buddhist perspective. It actually doesn't really matter whether you believe that climate change is caused by human activity or not, in order to share that perspective. I mean, personally it seems pretty obvious, simply be
cause the scientists tell me that it is. But even if you disagree, and there are Buddhists who disagree with that, it seems to me that that environmental perspective is a Buddhist value. So those Those are the things that I'm interested in identifying, those areas where there's a direct carryover from my Buddhist values to a political position, an issue in society. And I really don't think we should close down the discussion around that by all of the cautions which I've expressed earlier and put
in my article. I think that's how Buddhists can change society. So in doing that, we need to be careful not to get drawn into the political game and into political ideology. And Buddhism has a great deal to say about the dangers of how our thought becomes literalised and rigidified in what we can call ideology. And that's what we see playing out in mainstream politics very often. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, Vishwapani, because one of the things that I've found working in the forum that I
work in is that I think we might have to leave room for the fact that there's some political views that are incompatible with Buddhist views. So in my job, we look at awareness and how to cultivate awareness and mindfulness, but particularly mindfulness of views. So mindfulness of the perspective by which you're examining and making sense of your experience. In a way, I've given you the good side of people with very differing perspectives and finding a common ground and relating to each other o
n the basis of loving kindness and awareness. So there might be some views that are incompatible with Buddhism. The basic right view, as Vishvapani said, is that everything arises on dependence upon conditions. And one really has to see the implications of that. The problem comes when you try and tie direct policies to Buddhist views in a way that closes down debate and further examination. But yeah, I do think there is a reasonable case to say that there are some views that are incompatible wit
h Buddhism. Just to be slightly devil's advocate or provocative about this, I live in the United States. A lot of Buddhists I know, though not all Buddhists I know, see an active engagement with some of the political issues of the day as an active part of their Buddhist practice, for right or wrong, one could argue about that. I'm just aware that in real life, as it were, there are lots of people who have an engagement that's specific and particular with politics, where they don't feel that they
've necessarily rigidified into ideology, to use that phrase, which for Pani, they see it as an active part of their practice. I've also got socially conservative friends who have a very strong, quite in a way, authentic and heartfelt sense that that is a mistake, that to engage with the world in that way is a mistake and even threatens the integrity of the Dharma. Sometimes watching all of that playing out in our own community and other communities can both be sobering, even a little bit painfu
l. And also there's just this question of what kind of common ground do we find? We might all agree that nobody should rigidify around views. We might all agree that there's a long-term perspective, but you can still have very particular application either way. People who say, actually no, you really shouldn't engage with that because it's harmful to the Dharma. And people say no, that is the path, in a way that's an act of living out of the path. So how do we meet that conundrum? I think the co
nundrum of finding that there are different views that are genuinely strongly felt and held in our community is a part of our community maturing. Every religious group, every spiritual community has this. The Church of England in the UK, the Anglican Church which is both the Tory party at prayer and the home of a good deal of Christian socialism. So they have to manage that because that's what comes with maturity, with age, with scale. I think this is a challenge but we need to learn to listen t
o each other better and it's only really, I think, by doing that with each other that we'll be able to model for a wider a society where people are ceasing to be able to listen to each other? I think for me there's two aspects to this. One is the specific policies you hold as a Buddhist who may or may not be political, and the other is the style that you go about your politicking in. I've come to accept that you can be a serious Buddhist and have quite different political views, you know, quite
left-wing or quite right-wing or somewhere in the middle, and you just have to respect other people's views if they're not your own. But separate to that is the style with which people seek to do their politicking. And I think that is a very ethical issue. You can either manipulate people, demonize people, whip up public opinion, distort the facts, or play a much more straight bat and try and persuade people without resorting to any of those techniques. And I would like to see that as in any Bud
dhist to become politicians, honest persuasion rather than a more manipulative approach to politicking. It's an interesting point, this idea that when you get scale and when you get growth as a community or just age, you need to mature into these kind of questions and what you just said, Lokabandhu, seems relevant to that. I'm also aware that some people think it's the thin end of the wedge. I guess you could see the struggle the Anglican community has, for example, internationally to accept hom
osexuality as one of the reasons that religion itself can feel like a compromise to some people. There is a maturity to be had in trying to engage with that issue at scale, one of the dangers is nobody's happy with the outcome and that that actually impacts people's lives. And I think for some people that would be a question about the future of our particular community. I'm interested in the origins of our community as a way into this question. Our founder, Urgen Sargangarajchita, for those of y
ou who don't know, was quite an enigma, I think, when you try to look at him politically. An avid reader of the Telegraph, amongst other things – the Telegraph being a paper of the right in the UK – but also somebody who had quite a radical relationship to issues like gender, to issues like nuclear weapons, even climate. It's very difficult to put Sanger-Axt in a box politically. In fact, I think his life and the expression of his views resist that. But there is something about the range that he
holds and how people who are polarising politically want to claim him as their own. I think it's super interesting in our community. Everyone can find a piece of Sanger-Axt's writing or discourse that speaks to their particular perspective. Heather "I know what you mean, Chandra Das. I think you can find little quotes to back up quite a lot of things with Banteay. I suppose what interests me about his teaching, a few things that he said, but particularly a talk called Buddhism, World Peace and
Nuclear War, where he, on the one hand, he says, you know, be a good citizen, contribute to society. He's also said keep within the law. But then he said, you know, you might have to protest, you might have to go against what the government is saying. But within that talk, he also said the real importance of creating people in society, by which I think he means really deeply committed Buddhists who can be examples of sanity and compassion in the world, and examples of people who can take leading
roles in these very, very complex debates in a way that isn't polarised and that gives rise to some clear thinking. He had a lot of emphasis on clear thinking and clear expression of that thinking. And I suppose that's something that we could really look at in our community. I think there's some big debates going to happen soon, particularly around the trans issues, because our community has a lot of single gendered spaces. And yeah, can we be an example of sanity and compassion in the world. A
nd that's very, very important to me. And of course, one should also bring in India at this point, because about a third of our order is in India. And of course, politically, it means a lot to them, political statements. They themselves have had to work in a very, very charged sphere, where there's a real potential for actual violence erupting out of political disagreements. And the order members there have had to find a very, very steady line of sanity, dignity, compassion and what Sangharaj Ch
aturthi recommended, he said, you know, Buddhists should see all humanity as one. And I think they're great examples, there's some very, very great examples of leaders in our community in India that I think have a lot to teach us in the West when things become very polarised, because I think they've seen it in much more extreme circumstances. Yes, so on the question of Sanger-Achter's politics, I lived with Bante Sanger-Achter for six years and for the first three of those years we had dinner ev
ery night and we often talked about politics and we disagreed quite a lot. Actually at the moment I'm writing a book about Bante and I've been thinking quite a lot about him in the round and I think we can see his thought as being fragmented because we miss his attitude which was he He fundamentally felt out of sorts with the modern world. He just didn't feel that he belonged there. All sorts of values in the modern world, he thought, were inimical to what he really believed in, which was a spir
itualised world with a kind of sense of a hierarchy of values within it. So he criticised egalitarianism and liberalism because they seemed to be going against that hierarchical sense and it was essentially a spiritual hierarchy. He also saw greed and materialism for exactly what they were. That was his position and then he mapped that onto society in a way that I usually disagreed with. I don't think he understood capitalism and the effect it has. He once said to me, "Oh, capitalism, that's jus
t human nature." We were talking about Marxism at the time and why people were being attracted to Marxism. This was post-2008. I said, "Well, capitalism has a history and people are attracted to Marx because he describes that history." Essentially, the point is we don't understand these forces, these tremendous forces at work, and we need some kind of map. Marx offers a map, other people like that. But this was completely inimical to Bante's way of thinking. In one of his lectures he describes d
riving through the city of London and saying to his companion, "This is what we're up against." But he wouldn't systematise that into a view of the capitalist system because what he was really interested in, what he actually knew about, was what it means to practice a spiritual life for himself, for a sangha, a community of people doing something similar. And so his fundamental political contribution was about creating an alternative society, a new society which was based on different values, bu
t it was never clear how that society would impact the wider society. That was rhetoric, but there was never a strategy for how the new society would change the world. And I think because those new society type institutions no longer function very effectively in many cases, certainly not with the kind of growth that those of us who are around in let's say in the 1980s imagined they might. I think there's been a loss of faith in what we're developing as an answer to our social issues. So we have
an impulse from that social idealism that set our roots, an impulse to change society, but we don't have a method for doing that within Triratna. Not really. So that's why people I see gravitate towards more conventional political positions and conventional political involvement. And I think that is a great danger for us. We really need to rediscover our shared social vision. I think we've lost it and we need to find it again. That's very interesting to hear Vishwapani. I'm going to recall an ep
isode we did, I think about a year ago around Buddhist activism. And just as a maybe a slight, not exactly a counterpoint to what you're saying, my experience of listening to people who've gone into what seem like conventional political areas, whether it's anti-racism work or climate work or any kind of protest based thing, is that they quickly run up against these questions in their experience. They talk about this, they get there and they realise that they still don't want to have any part of
something that's fundamentally violent. They still want to bring mindfulness and kindness to bear in a way that feels revolutionary and they gradually insinuate those values into their work with other people. And I find that quite interesting to listen to because quite often people when they've got a concern about things like Buddhist activism, they do see the clear danger and there is a clear danger, but they don't hear the fact that the act of transforming small groups of people who are doing
that kind of work together is actually effective. New Jerusalems get built when you start to change the minds of the people that you're working with or playing with or living with. If I hear you correctly there's this sense that some people, to fill that gap that you've identified where there's a clear strategy for how to build a new world, some people go towards conventional activity and I think sometimes they try and transform that. Other people want to reassert the past. There's almost a kind
of danger of nostalgia around how things used to be. But again, I suppose we're still left with this question of are we hopeful about how this is playing out in our community. Do we see the possible synthesis of this or something over and above both of those positions that tend to drift into polarisation? JG I wouldn't mind responding to that. Just to say that I think it's very difficult to rediscover a shared social vision. I'm not sure how we would go about that in such a large order with so
many different views about things. But I think we should in a way stick to what we're good at. And what we're good at is the Dharma itself. Having confidence that the Dharma itself does affect society. I was listening to a panel discussion actually the other day with Sangha Ratchita and Sogyal Rinpoche and Thich Nhat Hanh. Even at that time, so many directions that people could take that they feel very passionate about within the society. And he said, "Well, you've got the social action without
the Dharma, and that clearly doesn't always work, but you've also got social action with the Dharma, and that can be a force for goodness in the world. And I think it's very, very difficult if we try and maintain a kind of unified position on social action points. But we are good at the Dharma and we are good at practicing the Buddha's teachings and helping people transform their lives. And I wonder whether we sometimes should have more confidence in that affecting society. If I could come in th
ere, I've heard people speak about the Dharma itself, but I think That's a notion I'm personally a bit wary of. It sounds sort of disembodied. And I think if you're going to live a spiritual life, your ideals always have to be embodied in some particular way of life and a particular choices of career or politics or whatever. So almost I don't know what the Dharma itself means. You've got to kind of put it into practice in some way or another. And then you're going to bump into other people putti
ng the Dharma into practice in their way. And that's where the conversation starts and gets interesting. And one way I found useful personally is to just reflect that, well, in Britain today there's various political parties full of politicians. They all get their hands dirty and it's easy to kind of criticise all of them. But I think behind each of the major political parties there's a kind of political philosophy and they've all got a certain ability to them. So speaking very crudely, behind c
onservatism is the desire to reward individual effort. Individual effort should be rewarded and individuals should be allowed to get ahead. you know, which has got a certain integrity. Behind socialism or the Labour Party is a kind of belief that people should have equal opportunity and shouldn't be given a birthright privilege just through accidents of birth. Behind the Greens is a fairly obvious desire to preserve the environment. And if you can see those relatively noble ideals behind the kin
d of cut and thrust and mess of individual political campaigns, it's maybe easier to respect different people's points of view. but I do think the Dharma has to be lived in particular ways by each individual person. When I say that stick to what we're good at practicing the Dharma, I don't mean that you don't act that out in the world. What I'm saying is that I think that people will engage in society with their own passions and that to really make sure that when they do that, that their perspec
tive really does come from the Dharma, that they're fully trained within the Dharma. In a way that was Dr. Ambedkar, who was, you know, the greatest Buddhist social activist that ever was. That was was his vision that people will be able to go out and transform society, but that they really needed to be rooted in the Dharma itself. And being rooted in the Dharma itself is very, very difficult. To really practice ethics, to really practice meditation, mindfulness, loving kindness, wisdom, takes a
lot of effort and a lot of training and time on retreat and things like that. But if we train ourselves in that, then that will be able to inform our social action and the way we express our dharma lives in society itself, with people taking possibly very, very different roles within that. >>Toby When I talk about a social vision, I don't necessarily mean a shared social philosophy. Actually, what I mean is something rather along the lines of what Vajratara and Lokabanda have also spoken about.
It comes from a belief that the dharma has something to say to the things that we care about in society, and that if we focus on ethical behavior and ethical practice, then we can get somewhere towards that. There's something else that I'd like to add, which comes actually from Yuval Noah Harari, who is very well known as a public intellectual, and he meditates two hours every morning. He goes on 60 day Vipassana retreats and thinks very, very clearly. And he said on the "Rest is Politics" podc
ast that the reason he does that, or at least the relevance of that to political issues, is that in meditating, he notices how his mind creates stories. He notices how he can't keep his attention free from those stories for more than a few seconds. And so how can he possibly understand something as complex as history or politics without doing a lot of work to unravel those stories so he can really see things much more clearly. And he's a remarkably clear thinker. But the other interesting phenom
enon about Harari is that for many years, you see this in his books, he has this kind of rather frightening distance from the issues he talks about, like the rise of AI and the threat that he thinks that that poses to society. And he can simply report that and trace for you these rather alarming consequences. But he's in Israel, he's a lecturer in Jerusalem, and Israel, as you may know, is undergoing the most dramatic, the most shattering political crisis of its history. And he's become passiona
tely involved in politics, in protesting against what's happening from the Likud coalition. So he still has an element of that distance and the clarity that enables him to see the phenomena that are unfolding before him and the views that are being put into practice in Israeli politics, but that doesn't preclude his involvement. And one of the other things that he said in his interview, which really speaks to the danger, I think, of our current point in history, is that conservative parties arou
nd the world are ceasing to exist. Actually, What Lokabandhu said in characterising Conservative parties about individuals getting ahead, that used to be called liberalism in the 19th century. Conservatives were about conserving things and the real conservational conservatives have given up or been defeated in country after country and they've been replaced by radical right-wing revolutionary parties which are wanting to unravel liberal democracy. So for me, there's quite a natural coincidence b
etween Buddhist perspectives and those of liberal democracy, simply because democracy allows space for different points of view, for testing out one policy and then addressing it. So the threat to liberal democracy, I think, is right up there with the threat to the planet, to our mental health. And all of these are things that I think are very important for Buddhists, where we actually have something to say. So my social vision for Buddhists is really about recognising what it is that we have to
contribute to the things that are tearing our societies apart and sharing a sense that we can be a force for good within those societies. It's very interesting to hear about Harari, both his preparation for his work, but also the fact that the society he's part of has now changed, presumably the way he engages with the world, the way he takes part. Perhaps he didn't expect to do that 10 years ago, but now he finds himself in this position. I think a lot of people listening will still be left wi
th that proper big question mark of what do I do about this, both in terms of my own mental states, my own social relationships, my friendships, the people I love who have different views. I live in a country where the last president has just been indicted, I think 53 times. And it's a hugely polarising issue for people. Probably at root anyone who cares about democracy, nobody's happy about that. It's not a very good arising that we've come to this pass. And I saw also in the context of the Sco
ttish independence vote, the real strain it put on families and close friendships with people with very different views all taking part in Buddhist community together, but feeling very strongly about things. So I'm wondering how each of you holds this tension. How has it evolved through your I don't know if any of you were young political animals and how that's changed over the years. But what's the state of the nation for you in terms of how you hold this tension and what you do about it in ter
ms of your own mind and your own engagement? Yes, I think that's a very interesting question to be asking. Thoughts have come to me during this conversation, which is I continue to feel strongly that any Buddhist political action has to be rooted in Buddhist values, which have to be fairly universal. But one value we haven't really talked about is the Buddhist value of detachment, or at least lack of attachment to your views and your passions and even outcomes. And it may be that offers some kin
d of route to a wholehearted engagement with the issues of the day, and yet a certain detachment from having to prevail and allowing yourself to let go when the time comes to let go, if you've maybe lost a particular discussion. I think letting go too soon amounts to giving up, but not letting go at all, amounts to a kind of refusal to accept others' points of view, if they may be in the majority or win the argument. Delicate balance to find, but maybe detachment is a Buddhist value that has to
find its way into Buddhist politics as well. That's the thought I'm left with. Yeah, I suppose in response to this, I do find it a very, very interesting discussion. And I do agree with Vishvapani. I think there are some things that, probably as Buddhists, we should be concerned about. One thing that I'd like to say is that if you do feel deeply concerned, that's okay. There are things to be deeply concerned about and Buddhism is sometimes misrepresented as saying you should have no opinion at a
ll, no view. But there is before that a right view and I think what we can do is to steer a steady course and to be within that able to change our minds about things. So I suppose that's what I'm left with is just this value of steering a steady course, of being an example of sanity and compassion in the world, and helping and seeing how we as Buddhists can make a contribution to society within these very, very difficult debates. Not just by what we say and the views that we hold publicly, but b
y who we are and what resource we can be for people. I think the main way that I've reflected on politics and Buddhism in recent years, it has been through doing the Thought for the Day broadcasts. One thing that became quite clear to me early on was that no one is interested in what I happen to think about an issue like, say, Brexit. Who cares what Vishvapani thinks about Brexit? But if I have something to say from a Buddhist perspective, which casts a fresh light from an ethical perspective, o
r in terms of the underlying values that I bring from my Buddhist practice, then that's relevant. That's a contribution. And that led me to look for the areas of overlap. So I've been very involved in the mindfulness movement and advocating that mindfulness is taken up as a practice at every level of society. And it seems to me that that is a real contribution that I can be genuinely confident in. I mean, actually, I've got some questions and concerns about the mindfulness movement as well, but
that's just part of the complexity. So I would really say to Buddhists wanting to square this circle, to focus on the areas where you feel most confident that there's a crossover between your Buddhist values and your desire to contribute to society and not to underestimate the difficulty of that kind of detachment that Lokabandhu and actually Yuval Noah Harari were talking about and not to simplify things. Part of the challenge of politics I think is embracing complexity. Well it's a shame to ha
ve to end this conversation anywhere but if we do have to end it somewhere and the idea of embracing complexity seems a pretty good place. We'll link to your article, Bishop Annie, in the show notes for this along with various other things. It's a very good place to start if you're listening just to get a sense of, well, not just the nature of that complexity, but what it is to reflect on it and what it is to take it seriously just as an ongoing practice that the shape of this is probably going
to change in your own life. I hope this conversation has also helped. I'd like to thank our guests today for being brave enough to show up and attach the names to an episode called Buddhism and Politics, which isn't the most straightforward thing even in a lovely community like Triratna to do. So thanks to you Lokabandhu for showing up today. LK – You're really welcome. Thank you for inviting me. MM – And thanks to you too Vajratara. It was delightful to have your perspective and I really apprec
iated just the image of us steering a steady course that's based very squarely on the Dharma, not being afraid of where that leads us. Yeah, well it's really great to be able to discuss these things and what it makes me realise is there's not a clear end point, if you see what I mean. There are some things that could go on and on and I really value hearing from Lokabandhu and Vishwapani as well. It's definitely stimulated my own reflections on this area. And thanks to you too Vishwapani. I guess
one of the things I'm most left with from both your article and your contributions is just how much you embody the essential nature of harmony in all this. We can't have these conversations if we're not prepared to show up harmoniously and put ourselves out there and own our stuff and also just be receptive to other people and you're exemplary at that. So thanks for all your engagement. >> DAVID Well, thank you for organizing the podcast, Chandra Dasa. When I find myself speaking about this or
writing about it, as I did in Tricycle, I just realize how far there is to go in really understanding what these issues come back to. And it always feels for me like work in progress. Well, it's a work in progress, it's a mess in progress, it's a delightful spiritual voyage or journey in progress, whatever it is. I hope you found it stimulating listening. And hey, as ever, if you enjoyed today's episode, please go to the podcast platform of your choice, presumably where you got this, and tell ot
her people about it. Give us a good review. There are a billion, million, squillion podcasts out there, probably all talking about politics at some point. Tell people about this one, tell your friends, people talking, start a conversation with someone whose views you don't necessarily agree with and see if you can be an exemplar of harmony along with our guest today. We'll be back soon with another episode on who knows what theme, but for now take care of each other, take care of yourself, I hop
e your practice is going well, whatever that looks like and we'll see you again soon. Bye for now. [MUSIC] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (dramatic music) [Music]
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