Consultation Paper

Consultation on Inter-Religious
Cooperation in Asia


April 5-10, 2003
Parapat, Indonesia

Jointly organized by:
Asia Pacific Alliance of YMCAs (APAY), Christian Conference of Asia (CCA), and Church Development Service (EED), Germany

Some Thoughts from Buddhism for Living Together

Lapapan Supamanta


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His Majesty the King of Thailand once spoke to the press that he wishes his reign not to appear in the history page. To him, history only records events such as wars, conflicts, disasters, holocaust, etc. The peaceful time is often quiet or not much mentioned. It seems that the time human beings can live together in peace is rare. However from time to time we see examples that convince us that peaceful coexistence is not only something possible, but a must.

According to Buddhist belief, living together is not only out of morality but also out of necessity since thing could only exist as dependent upon existence of other things. Nothing can exist alone. That is, thing is under “Dependent origination” rule. Besides, living together does not involve only human beings, but all beings are included. Therefore, the right attitude toward coexistence must be maintained so as to assure mutual benefit of all beings.

This paper attempts to look at why people could not live up to this ideal state of harmonious co-existence, at an individual and social level. Then, a brief analysis based on some Buddhist ideas is explored. The last part will propose some suggestion from a Buddhist stance.


Obstacles to Peaceful Co-existence

An important factor that obstructs co-existence involves a great deal the notion of self (atta) and defilement (kilesha). That there is no permanent self is contrast to ordinary understanding. In order to affirm existence of one’s self, the mind creates “the other’s”, as distinguish from one’s own. When one encounters the other self, duality of “I” vs “you”, “mine” vs “yours” is constructed in people’s mind, differentiation and comparison arises. No matter superiority, inferiority or even equality, all kinds of attachment to and differentiation of self bring about sufferings. This is a case for envy, jealousy, arrogance, hostility, wrath, etc., to name just a few.

Furthermore, the three major defilements – kilesa (greed, hatred and delusion) play an active role in conditioning people’s perception of things. Untrained mind tends to see things not as they really are, but distorted. People cannot see that all beings are comrades who suffer the same inescapable sufferings of birth, illness, decay and death, who seek happiness and avoid torment. Tinted with desire to satisfy one’s self, one begins to value things and want to possess. Possession and accumulation only for one’s own pleasure, enforced by ignorance of interconnectedness, will cause sufferings. For one to gain more and more, other will hold less and less since wealth, materials or resources are limited. Competition between those who gain and lose will be followed by hate toward each other and then violence. Living together then becomes difficult.

When self is fortified by creation of other self and perception of the latter is distorted by defilement, compassion, loving kindness, sharing, tolerance and other qualities that could cohere human beings together is fading.

Looking at collective level, as individuals share their living in a society, not only each person’s kilesa contaminates one’s perception. There is some more. We can see that in each community, there is a great deal of common values, culture, symbol, ideology, etc. that influence the members’ collective consciousness.

Take Thailand in the era of Communism-phobia for example. Communism was portrayed as demon aiming at destroying our country, demolishing Buddhism, and dethroning our monarch. State media cited everyday nationalism to guard against communism. Students at school learnt to hate communists. Even monks were used by state preaching that killing communist entailed no sin. The outcome is, perceiving that they are not the same as us, different from us, and harmful to us, Thai people were convinced and were able to kill other Thai fellows for the sake of national security.

We can see that the defiled consciousness is within leaders of a society and also in institutions in that society, e.g. education, media, politics, religion, economic, etc. Both leading figures and social structural institutions have strong influence over perception of individuals in that society. Social reality as interpreted, preached, reproduced by both influential entities, shape citizen’s mind through a set of language and symbol to think, to view and to have attitude in the same direction without questions. If the collective social consciousness is benevolent to living together, that’s fine. But, there are many cases that they disturb peaceful co-existence. You can think of stereotype, mockery and discrimination against ethnics, sexuality, belief, political ideology, etc. in your own society that members are spellbound.


The leverage point

According to Buddhist teachings, ordinary folks are easily under control of misperception because their mind is not aware of how the perception is conditioned. Dependent origination rule tells us that, the critical point is the point of sensory contact. When sensory contact takes place (eyes with object, ears with sound, etc.) personal defilement and social consciousness are at work quickly to interpret the meaning, form perception in our mind and cause feeling - pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Craving and clinging follow, then. The mind that is dominated by craving and clinging will create attachment to sensual forms, view, behavior and identity that is distorted - reality perceived is concocted according to influence of the defilement of that person and of the society that one belong to. The ignorance contact will determine behavior of people. If ignorance contact is allowed to happen that followed by craving and clinging, ignorance tend to be perpetuated, then people tend to be under harmful impetus for their action.

Followed this analysis, therefore, attitude, view or behavior whether they are to promote or to bar co-existence is a consequence of people’s perception of reality. If peaceful co-existence is what we want, we need to make sure that our perception is not distorted or influenced by negative consciousness. To do so, religious practice is at hand to help. In this paper, I will share from Buddhist background, since Buddhism is one that is interested a great deal in mind and mental process that forms perception.


Be mindful to what arises in mind

As action follows perception which is a consequence of ignorance sensual contact which is influenced by personal defilement and social consciousness, it is important that people need to be free from personal defilement an social consciousness at the point of contact. To be free deals with the mindfulness to watch and beware of what kind of concoction arises in our mind.

At the social level, this is also important for it is extremely difficult for citizen to realize what influences their mindset. If citizen could develop the mental ability and critical thinking to as to be aware of social reality that is negative to co-existence, they could be able to expand their consciousness beyond the socially conditioned consciousness. This is the critical first step that citizen be able to question, examine, and evaluate the meanings of language and symbol reproduced by social institutions. They would be able to single out what is benevolent to social harmony, and keep it, and what is not, and challenge it. Such ability cannot be obtained from intellectual learning alone, it must be sharpened by religious practice of mindfulness, concentration and insight training so as to break through negative symbolization, language, culture, ideology, norms, etc. that heavily restrict the citizen.


Guidelines for harmonious living

Buddhism does not have things like commandment. Instead we have guideline of behavior (sila) that the Buddha encourage us to contemplate on. If we agree, we will comply ourselves to those guidelines. The fundamental idea of precepts is to make ourselves harmless, or to reduce the possibility that we are harmful to other. This will ensure individual-to-individual contact to be in normality. As a consequence, we will benefit from harmless relationship, understand the interconnectedness and make ourselves a factor for harmonious co-existence.

The lay Buddhists refer to “the Five Precepts”, which is the minimum requirement for peaceful community. The guidelines mentioned hereunder invite us to contemplate on their benefit from practicing them.

- Refraining from taking live of all forms and preserving lives. The first precept encourages us to think also about bio-diversity, non-violence culture and rights of all beings to exist on this planet in their own way.
- Refraining from taking what is not given, and practicing generosity. It does not only make us to respect rights of others over their possessions, but also to question seriously about the centralization and control over resources depriving some people from even simple livelihood and unjust acquisition of wealth.
- Refraining from sexual misconduct, and practicing respect for women and responsible relationships. This precept puts emphasis on right relationship, starting from relationship with one’s own self and body to relationship with family. This prevents people to get into relationship just for a mere sexual drive that hurt all parties concern. Instead it promotes relationship based on respect, responsibility and commitment. It also expands to issue of respect for women.
- Refraining from false speech, and practice constructive communication. It promotes truths and responsible communication.
- Refraining from falling into intoxicated state of mind, and practicing clear perception and awareness. The basic idea is that one must stay away from all kinds of intoxicants causing mindlessness - ranging from alcohol, drug, tobacco, news, advertisement to anything that enchant us so that we are not able to have clear mind.


Sharing

People are encouraged to develop up to their potentiality. But people’s potentiality differs, some are more able and can gain more, while some are less. The idea, therefore, is to reduce the gap between the have and the have-not so that the society can stabilize. This is primarily to ensure material adequacy for necessity of all members of society. The mechanism is called “dana” which means sharing, helping out, or donating. Sharing can be in forms of material, time, knowledge, advise, charity etc. Even merit can be shared! It helps to strengthen friendship and to tighten community life.

We can easily think of the superior doing charitable action, e.g. giving away money, etc. But for the suppressed people, it is critical that they could cultivate the highest form of dana, that is abhaya dana (to give fear away). Only when the suppressed can be aware of contaminated consciousness and go beyond the obsession of fear, wrath or hatred, they can cultivate inner strength, can concentrate and see clearly the causes of the problems. This of cause involves a lot of mental work of mindfulness practice.


Create a Society that Facilitates Coexistence

I would like to argue that living together could be possible only in a society that allows us to do so. As mentioned earlier, social institutional structures and leaders are influential factors that determine whether we will have peaceful co-existence or discrimination against some fellow human beings. Although the first step is that citizen need to cultivate critical thinking and question the existing social structures that perpetuate discrimination, the next step is to create a society that nurtures harmonious co-existence. Many Buddhist thinkers try to identify elements of society that are influential to this matter. We call it “Dhammic Society”. In short it is our effort to establish a society that is just, peaceful and balanced between materialist and spiritual dimension (not exclusively Buddhist, but based on core teachings of any religion).

Here are some ideas as a platform to explore further situations of each community. All elements are modified with “right”. The word “right” is Buddhist terms. It is not “right” in dogmatic terms. It means correct, proper, in harmony with natural law and in accordance with causes, purpose, time, space (community/society), all parties involved and one’s own self. The “right” is the one that promotes no attachment, no craving, no clinging, but facilitates harmless and normal relationship in a community.


Right religion


The right religion is the one that serves as an instrument to transform practitioners, create inner strength, and encourage peaceful coexistence. It is not an escape, not a mere bundle of uncommunicatable rituals or superstitions, not soothing activities, not a form of brainstorming and not a blind faith.

In order to achieve this, the practitioners need to critically study teachings from different perspectives for social issues. It is not a kind of expertise research, but a critical reflection that all parties involved in the society are invited to participate. In this way we could accumulate piece-by-piece religious perspective on all aspect of our society. For example a perspective on wholesome business and ethical guideline can come from a group of businesspersons inspired by Buddhist teachings etc. Once we can see religious (in this case Buddhist) perspective on various social issues, creativity so as to make religion relevant to the sufferings of our time and space comes up.


Right education

It is critical for a peaceful coexistence that education system is a participatory learning process that knowledge, talent, skill, understanding is shared in such a way that children and grown-up could discover potentiality, and acquire happiness and self-respect. It must be free from constriction of economic assumptions, political ideologies, narrow belief systems, patriarchy, and pseudo-science. It must be the one that cultivate both intellectual and intuition wisdom.

People in many countries are now aware that how formal education cripples and spellbinds people. It is criticized and challenged while the right to alternative education is called for. Popular alternative movement is growing everywhere, in a variety of fashion.


Right leadership

If the society we live in is still an authoritarian in which citizen are controlled, oppressed, divided and conquered, and not allowed to mature, we cannot hope for a place for peaceful co-existence. We need to transform the leadership into the one that direct people to the right direction; peace, compassion, mutual help, self-reliance, justice and other desirable qualities. The right leadership is important, as it is a model or inspiration for the people to live up to ideal state. Of course the way toward this must be nonviolent, not resort to all kinds of force and coercion.

We have to start form where we are. If the right leadership cannot be expected out there, at least in our small community, social action group, organization, we have to actualize and set an example.


Right organization and government

If we are to talk about living together, it is inevitable that we need to address the way our community or society is structured, that is issue of political and administration system. Popular political participation process is a point to emphasis here rather that the political struggle to take over power. This dimension of the society, when transformed to be “Buddhist (also other spirituality’s) right”, will ensure that all citizen have a say in the way one’s country is run and the purpose it is running toward. The preferable system must stay way from a self-center, individualistic, competitive regime with ritualized election and dirty power game.

Again, in order that we will be able to project this into the mainstream society, we need to experience it within our own small group. If the social action group is still bureaucratic, patriarchal and authoritarian, how can we go out and change the society at large to something contradict to our own organization?

In Buddhism, The Buddha formulated a sangha for his people as a form of decentralized, small-scaled community. This is one example that we can go back to study and get inspired.


Right communication

Communication is one of the elements that play a role of perpetuating ideology, social consciousness, symbol and language that shape citizen mindset. We need to be sure that this influential factor is in benevolent way for peaceful co-existence. We need to be watch out whether communication in our community spreads a true, honest, clear information. All voices in our community must be heard, all comment respected, all perspectives included.

In order to correct this element, we can actually do many things. Starting at individual level, communication, both reception and spreading of information must be done with mindfulness and critical thinking. Alternative media can be encouraged in our community as well as freedom of speech. In Thailand, we are struggling to have community radio station. It’s said to be illegal now as all radio and TV broadcasting is controlled by government or military, otherwise by business. But it is what we need to empower people with data and information. Also, critical evaluation of publicized information and news is one of the tasks to check out “wrong communication”.


Right culture

Culture is one of the elements that extremely influences people’s collective view and behaviour, and one that is difficult to transform. It might be arduous but we need to have courage to look into our culture and criticize whether it facilitates or hinders peaceful coexistence. If we could detect any violent, abusive, cruel, discriminative characteristic, we need to challenge it so as to convey the wholesome value.

As a consequence of the first element, unless we are able ground our right culture based on religious reflection, we can be creative to make use of cultures – be they drama, songs, plays, etc. to be relevant to social issues and be active to take the role of fostering social harmony.


Right sexuality and family

This element is to establish a proper relationship both at personal level and inter-personal level. People need to understand and be at ease with their own body and sexuality in a sense that this is no alienation from one’s own nature. Then, establishment of responsible and wholesome relationship with other persons can be possible. This is not at all a private business. Healthy sexuality and family are interdependent on healthy community and society at large.

There are some social values that shape citizen’s outlook on sexuality, love and marriage to be under our scrutiny. Romantic whim may bar us from reality that marriage is a hard work that needs compassion and wisdom. Abuse of women and children is one of many myths that need to be challenged. So is the commercialization of women and pornography that portray women as an object, not equal human fellows.


Right economics

In order that all members of society get adequate material necessity to sustain their living, we need to have a right economic system. We cannot live peacefully in a society full of competition, extreme indulgence and extreme poverty.

The right economics must involve right production, right consumption and right distribution. It is important to think about benefit of simple lifestyle, sufficiency, efficient use of natural resources. This will also involve the proper and benevolent relationship about the rich and the poor, the producer and consumers. For the economic to be more humane, the rich-and-the-poor gap must be shrunk, fair share resources uses to be promoted and the producer-consumer distance shorten.

The communal or grass-root initiatives on alternative and sustainable small economic projects are blossom in every corner of the world. They need to be recognized and encouraged as one of critical factors leading us toward peaceful co-existence.

Right ecology

Ecology is home to all beings not only human, but only human beings hold enough capacity to harm ecology. It is therefore our great responsibility to keep such capacity in check and transform it into wholesome preservative effort for the sake of one’s own benefit, for other beings’, and for mutual benefit.

The right ecology is an element that interconnects with other elements particularly politic, economic and education. The most concern ecological crisis involves, I can say, practice to control and make use of natural resources. We need to liberate this element from the constraint of economic proficiency enchantment. But it must be managed in inclusive manners. Human beings, other beings, culture, value, etc. must be taken also into account.

Also, we can find creative ecological preservation effort by villages in many countries. Experiences in Thailand involve application of religious practices and rituals to protect lake, forests, rivers, etc. Religious personnel, monks and nuns, take active role in leading or inspiring villagers to take care of local ecological systems.


Right play

The approach to peaceful coexistence is not dull. It can be playful. In fact playfulness is one of human habit to reenergize us. However, we need to consider the way of recreation whether it is constructive or destructive. Whether our play, sports, game, entertainment promotes friendship or exaggerate malefic social discourses, discrimination, abuse, competition or violence that tear the society apart.

Examples in Thailand include a “Spiritual Entertainment Hall” in Suan Mokkha Temple, Chaiya, Surat Thani province of Thailand, and Dhamma Park Gallery in Lamphune province. Both examples display painting, poem, sculptures that express both pleasure and awareness. It is interesting if we can include artist and athletes in a process of rethinking about the right play.


Right monitoring

In comparable to mindfulness at individual level to detect misperception arises in the mind, society also need a censoring mechanism. It is to prevent from falling into the false track that might disturb peaceful co-existence.

Instead of having a few people to monitor the majority, we might need groups of individual involve in a participatory and transparent process to watch out what is happening in our society, to criticize in order to ensure harmony and diversity. This must be a learning process for benefit of public, not a control instrument.

In fact, there are plenty of examples. At international level, we have group to watch out in various issues, human rights, peace, ecological, etc. At grass-root level, many initiatives can be found also.


Right community

In an era that individualism is so strong as our time, we need to shift the emphasis and balance individual-community relationship. It is important to contemplate on interrelated nature of our beings and community at large. Our effort must be devoted to establish and nurture a harmony and unity in which diversity is respected.

It is important to note that community must have common direction and aspiration enough that all members feel of their membership, but not at all rigid uniformity. It must be flexible enough to care for diversity and differences. Also, we have to start from our own community and we can be strong and confident to stand for right community.


Buddhist attitude toward faith and interfaith

As the twelve elements aforementioned start with religion, here I would like to share special note on this. Often religion is associated with faith. The closest word to “faith” in Buddhist terms is saddha which means “confidence”. Saddha is regarded a threshold when people decide to come closer to religion, in this case Buddhism. In a spiritual quest, one might encounter myriad of teachings, get confused, shop around, and touch upon a bit of this and that teaching without going deeply into it. That’s why we need saddha so as to stay put with one chosen teaching long enough to realize its benefit. Before one makes up one’s mind to give a particular teaching a go, one needs to study well enough. Therefore saddha in Buddhism is no way a blind faith. A mere saddha is not approved by The Buddha, but it must be accompanied by critical inquiry and practice. This makes religious practice a process of critical learning to as to put out sufferings with saddha is only a first step. If singled out and cut off from the whole process, saddha is prone to be abused and become another misperception and discourse that promotes attachment to one’s own belief and discrimination.

The Buddha never asked his followers to stick to his teachings or to follow without question. He always challenged us to try and mentioned that his teachings are just an instrument to help those who reflect and practice get out of sufferings. At a point that one is fully awaken, all teachings must be abandoned the same manner as a raft is abandon once one gets ashore. Only a fool carries the raft with him, which is absolutely useless. Even one’s own religion at the end is to be abandoned it makes no sense at all for the Buddhist to attach to religion in such a way that it is emphasized as a cause for discrimination.

It seems to us that human beings have always been in trouble regarding how to live with people from different faith. Conflict and war related to different belief happened from time to time. We have to give this a serious thought if we are to live together in peace.

Followed the rule of the Noble Truth, the only way to overcome trouble of interfaith is to confront it. That is, we need to go out and have dialogue with those with other belief in respectful way. By exchange, we can realize that, the other faith is just like one’s own faith in the manner that it inspires and guides its follower to develop up to the fullest state of human beings. It is a source for ethical guidance for its followers emphasizing love, patience, generosity, tolerance, etc. all that good quality that is wholesome for peaceful living together. Of course the approach is different but their function means well.

One critical preliminary condition for the interfaith dialogue and understanding is that one must be serious in practice according to one’s own faith. Only by practicing, one would internalize compassion so that recognition of the same quality but from different spiritual approach is possible. By and by one will transcend from superficial diverse right through the essence.

One way to look at diversity of faith is just like a medicine. Even for the same illness there is variety of medicine that works. But a patient takes only one kind that most suitable according to his/her condition. Similarly, I feel that Buddhism make sense to me. It fits my inclination, my nature. But for other people, other religion might suit them even better. So long as people get well from the disease by taking a particular medicine, it is ridiculous to fight over differences of active ingredient written in the label of medicine’s bottle.

According to Buddhist belief, we human beings are busy already to overcome inescapable sufferings of birth, decay, illness and death. It is not a good strategy at all to add unnecessary trouble relates to different religions that obstruct peaceful co-existence. In fact religion of any kind is a critical factor that make people more righteous and competent to deal with other individual and collective defilement manifested in forms of war, conflict, poverty, injustice, ecological crisis, etc. that put all beings not only human at jeopardy.

As a matter of fact, we all have to bear in mind that a peaceful co-existence is not an exception, but our very natural normality made difficult only by our own defilement.


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