Culture, Social Justice, and Meditation
How do we as practitioners decide how, when, and where to engage in the world? This is the very hard question I asked of Daw Viranani, who broke down how culture plays into his decision.
“There is a clear assumption that if your practice has borne fruit, it will manifest in actions of speech and actions of body.”
Question: “Moving to another topic, in past several years, there's been discussion of engaged Buddhism. This has certainly been something quite important and valuable in looking at the past year in America, with some of the situations that we face in our culture, where we ask to what extent should one's Dhamma practice and one's spirituality and Buddhist meditation be connected to the social issues of the outside world?
This is something that in our country, a lot of different meditation centers, monasteries, and traditions have been grappling in their own way with how they're handling bias, racism, prejudice, and our own social justice issues.
Right now, in Myanmar, there is a different set of questions as far as, what extent does engaged Buddhism go? What is the proper involvement between one's meditation and spiritual practice with social justice problems in the world? So especially at this moment, during this current turbulent moment in Myanmar history, what is the proper relationship between Dhamma practice and social justice for you? What is the proper relationship between metta and vipassana, and any kind of engagement or concern for social justice movements?”
Daw Viranani: “I'm a little schizophrenic in answering this question, because I'm American, but I live here [in Myanmar]. So what I can say, in terms of my impulses, my conditioned impulses about what I would be doing, and what I have wanted to do over this last year. Had I'd been in the States, I would have been out marching in the streets, quite literally.
But the situation here is different. And the proper response is quite different. And the way it's held is quite different.
In terms of context, what I certainly feel very free to say is we make such an artificial division between our formal practice and our daily life practice. But really, what's the difference? There's only our six sense doors, happening at different speeds and different different stuff coming in. So there's seeing hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, thinking, whether we're sitting on our cushion, or walking down the street or responding to whatever we see or hear.
So there are only ever these moments of sense contact coming in. Whether we're on a cushion, doing formal practice, or doing formal walking practice, or engaged in the world. So how it's held here is implicit.
There is a clear assumption that if your practice has borne fruit, it will manifest in actions of speech and actions of body. So nobody does anything explicit or separate. There isn't like, 'okay, now we're going to do a social justice thing as Dhamma practitioners' because as Dhamma practitioners, that comes out with working on behalf of others. That's just a natural response is the practice.
So, there is a trust that with deeper practice, action will happen. Of course, in the context of being here, there are limits to that. There are limits to what we can do that is useful and safe.”