Bernie Glassman’s name is all round the Buddhist-inspired Greyston projects in Yonkers, just up the Hudson River from New York City. He’s Roshi Bernie in Greyston bakery, where formerly unemployed men and women produce gourmet cakes and bread. He’s Bernie Roshi in the Family Inn, which provides housing for the homeless. He’s Sensei in the nursery school for the children of the Inn’s occupants. And he’s plain Bernie in the Greyston headquarters and the huge building site next door, where a Catholic monastery is being turned into a health centre and apartments for people with hiv and aids.

I was expecting to meet a charismatic teacher, a dynamic whirlwind of energy – Bernie from Brooklyn, Jewish fixer turned Zen entrepreneur. But I found myself facing a short, unassuming man in late middle age, with a bulbous nose and quiet eyes. I liked the way he paused to think before answering. He listened.

Listening seems to lie at the heart of Glassman’s philosophy. He talks about ‘bearing witness’, by which he means being open and receptive to experience, and he relates this to his formal Zen training: ‘In a koan you have a problem. You can’t bring your intellect to it. You sit with it. You bear witness to the situation and then a solution will come. It is the same in regular meditation, which I call “bearing witness to the wholeness of life”.’

Glassman’s koan has been how to bring what he sees as the spiritual core of Zen Buddhism to modern America in a flexible, effective and non-dogmatic way. He is a radical, he told me, an experimenter. ‘I was brought up a socialist and, though I started to practise Zen in 1960, I never left the area of social action. I always wanted to integrate the two. At the Zen Center of Los Angeles I helped to create various projects – a medical clinic, businesses and so on. So when my teacher Maezumi Roshi asked me to move to New York in 1979, I wanted to bring Buddhism to all aspects of community. I printed up a letterhead with the slogan “integrating zazen with social action in an interfaith environment”.’

This approach to Buddhist practice was met with incomprehension and mistrust. In New York Glassman found a middle-class group with a fondness for Japanese ritual and the quiet of meditation. They wondered if his approach was ‘real Zen’: ‘At my first meeting with the people who were to become the board and students, many people just didn’t believe what I was saying’.

In 1997 the situation is different. Now that Buddhist ideas and practices are starting to pervade American society, many people are outgrowing the attraction of exotic Asian forms, and the desire to escape into a mysterious spiritual realm. They want Buddhism to be relevant. For some this means addressing the emotional issues articulated by psychotherapy; for others it means stepping outside the generally affluent, mostly white social enclave inhabited by most western Buddhists, to engage with the problems of the wider society.

Despite the danger of forgetting that the central Buddhist practice of transforming consciousness through meditation practice is itself a form of engagement, this approach is catching on. At a recent conference the writer Peter Matthiessen (one of Glassman’s leading disciples) argued that the emergence of ‘socially engaged Buddhism’ marks a new epoch in the history of the Buddhist tradition and defines how it should be practised in the West. Glassman himself is one of the leading Buddhist proponents of ‘social engagement’, and the best-known aspects of his work are emblematic of the new attitude. These include street retreats, in which participants live the life of down-and-outs, and interfaith ‘bearing witness’ retreats, the first of which was held last year at Auschwitz.

The more I looked into the growing interface between Buddhism and social action, the larger Glassman’s influence seemed to loom. There are many examples of western Buddhists building their own forms of practice and institutions, thereby changing their bit of society; but I found nothing comparable to Greyston as an attempt to change the wider community. What happens, I wondered, when Buddhists step outside an environment where they can easily set the terms? How can the values of spiritual life be sustained in that exposed territory?

Glassman told me how his work in Yonkers had developed from a conventional Zen centre to the current network of projects. ‘I had a sense of timing. The first thing we needed was a meditation and retreat schedule. Then it was Right Livelihood, which in the beginning was a work-training for Zen practitioners.’ This meant starting a gourmet bakery where the workers treated the work as form of Zen practice, one which Glassman insisted was as valuable as sitting in meditation. But he was soon itching to engage with the world beyond the Buddhist community. ‘We were living three miles south of the bakery. When I walked to work, I set out in a beautiful, wealthy area but as I got closer, moving into poorer and poorer areas, somehow my spirits would lift. And I would feel, yes, this is where I want to do my work.’

As the bakery became financially stable, Glassman decided the next step was social action, in response to the needs of the poor districts. But rather than adding on a little social work to existing Buddhist activities, he looked seriously at the needs of the run-down neighbourhood around the bakery. ‘The greatest problem was homelessness, but the homeless were mostly single-parents and it was obvious that as well as housing they needed jobs and child-care.’

For those involved, this decision to take on the community’s needs as their needs changed everything. ‘We had a meeting and I asked the practitioners if they would be prepared to open up to the unemployed. It would be much more difficult. By then we had sort of learnt how to run the bakery, but to train people with no skills was a whole different prospect. Even so, it was a unanimous vote to do that. I stopped hiring Buddhists and the main focus of the bakery became to provide work for the unemployed. That was 10 years ago and there is now one Zen practitioner left in the bakery.’

Whereas conventional government programmes might treat social difficulties as isolated problems that can be solved by spending money, Glassman saw the apparent difficulties as the product of a web of interconnected conditions, and evolved a holistic approach to tackling them. In 1991 Greyston opened the Family Inn, with apartments for homeless people, mostly single mothers, and a day-care centre for 60 children. As Greyston has attracted more attention it has won funding from government agencies and trusts, and catalysed local help and support. When I visited in early 1997 its activities were expanding. New apartments for the homeless were being built; while the health centre and apartments for those with hiv and aids marked a whole new area of activity. Meanwhile, the bakery has sales over $3 million (including an exclusive contract for chocolate-chip cookies with Ben & Jerry’s, the gourmet ice-cream business) and has been joined by other business projects.

The most distinctively Buddhist aspect of Greyston’s philosophy is the idea that the underlying cause of social problems is not just poverty, but also people’s attitudes and behaviour. Meeting some of the more experienced Greyston workers, I was impressed by their gratitude to Greyston and their commitment to its work. Typically they had been caught in the problems of American inner-city culture: drugs, homelessness, teenage pregnancy. Years ahead of ‘welfare to work’, Glassman saw the need to help people help themselves; and Greyston had offered them a chance to make sense of their lives. Above all, it enabled them to be part of a community, and to give something back through helping others follow the same path. As an alternative to the fragmentation of the broader society, Greyston seeks to establish a sense of belonging, which is a basis for feeling connected with others, and therefore for ethical action.

It was striking that there were very few Buddhists now working in Greyston – 15 out of 100, Glassman estimated. But as far as Greyston was concerned, Glassman had clearly left his white, middle-class Zen students behind and become interested communicating his Zen values to the ghetto, and the society he was creating was the form of that communication. In his mind, the Greyston activites form a mandala, the Tibetan symbol for integration. ‘I’ve always had the idea that we were trying to embody a mandala of five Buddha families. The Buddha family, at the centre, I defined as spirituality; vajra as study, the need for clarity, which is what I’m developing now; ratna as Right Livelihood; karma as social action; and padma as communication, meaning all the families working in harmony. So we are trying to integrate all these aspects and form a greater whole.’

Clearly there is far more to this than improving social conditions, and Glassman’s ambitions go way beyond those of conventional social work. ‘I’m not looking for a way folks can get off the streets and make money,’ he told me. He believes that out of the community he is creating will emerge a new expression of the spiritual values he has been trained in. ‘Many years ago I told my teacher I felt I had to let go of my training, to become part of the people here and wait until a new Buddha-dharma arose. It needed to be an appropriate model for the inner city. If we tried to pass on our forms, no matter how much we tried we’d be imposing a form upon them.’

It took me some time to understand what Glassman was driving at, partly because of the scope of his vision. It is as if Greyston were a field and Glassman a farmer waiting for seeds to sprout. ‘I have had to be patient, but I’m really not concerned how long it takes. The question is, are we going through transformation? Is this somewhere that leads to the raising of the bodhi-mind?’

At first I assumed that what Glassman had in mind was a new form of Buddhism appropriate to the inner city. This was an intriguing prospect – Buddhist centres in both the us and Europe attract a relatively narrow range of people, and usually there are few black faces to be seen. It became clear, however, that when Glassman uses terms like bodhi-mind and Buddha-dharma he does not mean anything that could be called Buddhism. Instead he speaks of ‘a spirituality which helps people realise the oneness of life’, which may or may not bear some relation to the forms of the Buddhist tradition. In other words, he hopes that by establishing an interconnected community based on ethical action and informed by his values, a new spirit would grow up between people which would constitute a new form of spirituality in its own right.

I found it hard to know what this might mean or see how it might come about. The more I probed, the more indeterminate Glassman’s formulations seemed. Glassman himself stresses the importance of ‘not knowing’ and his freewheeling approach is what makes his work so unpredictable and adventurous. However, this characteristic highlighted for me Glassman’s curious relation to the Buddhist tradition. Although a senior figure in American Zen, he believes in ‘a spirituality that goes beyond particular religious traditions while at the same time honouring the differences’. Buddhism is, then simply ‘a form’ of spirituality, while others have their own and equal validity.

Taking this a step further, Glassman has controversially given Dharma transmission (the ‘authority’ to embody and pass on the Zen lineage) to a rabbi and to a Catholic priest. Roshi Philip Kapleau, a member of an older generation of western Zen teachers, described this practice as ‘a threat to the integrity of Zen’. Certainly it suggests an ultra-liberalism, and a view that the conceptual rigour and the systematic nature of practice (which have characterised the Buddhist tradition) are of secondary importance for Glassman.

Despite concerns that Glassman’s liberalism throws out the Buddha with the bathwater, it also seems closely related to his Zen teaching. He is palpably frustrated with the many forms of Buddhism that have been domesticated by mainstream middle-class American society, and whose limitations are shown up by their inapplicability to the inner city. As an alternative, Glassman is organising a network of sympathetic social projects, the Peacemaker’s Community, which will include Joan Halifax’s hospice in New Mexico and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work with mindfulness meditation in Massachusetts hospitals. Greyston may also choose to join. For Glassman this and the associated Zen Peacemaker’s Order will provide something missing from American Buddhism. ‘Many people with a vocation for social action felt they were doing something wrong. It seems crazy that religious people should feel guilty about doing social action, —but that has been the atmosphere in this country!’

One danger is that without people committed to spiritual change within themselves, Greyston may lose contact with its spiritual roots. Economic pressures threaten to re-absorb Greyston’s values into the prevailing values of society. In the day-care centre I met Wendy, whose experience seemed to embody this dilemma. Her first contact with Greyston was when she was given an apartment in the Family Inn. ‘Greyston had confidence in me when I didn’t have confidence in myself. I love Jishu [Glassman’s wife]. She encouraged me to go back to school.’ Wendy now works as an administrator in the day-care centre and told me about the issues it faces. ‘The Greyston philosophy is wonderful, but it’s hard to work with unqualified people. We always took staff from the Inn, but that lessens the service to the children. We asked ourselves: “Are we here for the staff or the children?” Now we hire professionals.’

The pressure to improve quality also threatens the centre’s ability to meet the needs of the poorest people for whom it was originally intended. ‘We are drowning financially, so we’re looking at putting our rates up $30 a month above what welfare will pay.’

I asked Glassman if the day-care centre was being sucked into the educational system and becoming essentially no different from any other pre-school. Was Greyston losing control of the values on which the projects operated? ‘It’s a good question. We’re at the stage where more emphasis needs to be brought to the spiritual component. This is what I call the padma energy, the spiritual energy that keeps it all together. If we don’t, it can easily go the route you are describing. The tendency is for each bit of the mandala to go in a standard egocentric way. So yes, we want to serve the children and the staff, and the whole mandala.’

the crux of the problem, however, is where are the people who will be able to make this real and effective? In the past Glassman was a personal mentor to many Greyston staff and personally provided much of the impetus and direction. But now there are many calls on his time. ‘I miss seeing him’, one worker at the Inn told me. ‘People are saying the Greyston administration doesn’t care, there won’t be jobs for us at the new facilities that are being built. They need to communicate more what it is all about.’

Glassman acknowledged the problem but he has faith that the process he has started in Greyston will throw up the answers. ‘I was a founder, and as I moved from piece to piece there was that reaction. Yes, the problem is real, and I haven’t figured out a way of doing it smoothly. But I don’t think it would have worked if I had stayed as a mentor. The mentors need to come from within.’

These leaders who will emerge from the community are the missing link in realising the Greyston vision – people who have picked up the values implicit in Greyston, and can act as catalysts in the community. Without them Greyston will surely go the way of so many religious-based charities and become merely good, useful, but essentially conventional social work. However, the process Glassman describes is slow and organic. ‘I’m waiting for the leaders to arise, to be trained and to create the forms for Greyston. If that doesn’t happen, this experiment won’t have worked. But I’m sure it will. I can see the people already, and we’ll see it as soon as we can provide a means for them to be trained in a way that makes sense. I need to work with those role models: people who are comfortable with what I’m doing but are steeped in their own culture, and aren’t looking to leap out into ours and leave the others behind.’

As an example of this process Glassman cited Gary, a man of impressive clarity and conviction whom I had met at the bakery. ‘A number of years ago a visitor came from a foundation that was evaluating the bakery and asked Gary, “Is Zen Buddhism being taught here?” Gary replied, “The bakery was started by Buddhists who had a way of doing the work for the work itself. They trained us and then we trained other people. So if you ask someone on the bakery floor they’d say they don’t have anything to do with Zen Buddhism; but they do – in their way of working”.’

As well as the Peacemaker’s Community, Glassman has plans for a new academy called the Peacemaker’s Institute, where people can learn his approach to social action. This would give Glassman a way to work with future mentors. ‘The Peacemaker’s Institute is the last piece of the jigsaw. It is essential to produce leaders and mentors. Until then, the gap you’re seeing will remain.’

Precisely because Glassman takes radical stances it is hard to understand his work; there are few points of comparison. Time alone will tell whether Greyston is truly developing ways to make the spiritual resources of the Zen tradition accessible to the ghetto. Even if it is ‘merely’ social work, it is none the less doing enormous good. For all my questions, Glassman’s work is being pursued with vigour and imagination and, as he said, it is an experiment. It is hard not to be impressed by Glassman’s huge patience, his ability to think long-term and to open himself to the needs of a situation. Adopting the perspective of the inner-city population in itself radicalises him.

Despite the hyperbole of his language, there is something highly attractive in his essential approach. Through creating projects that meet immediate material needs, a community is perhaps being born in which people care for one another, and where the social structures are themselves a teaching of interconnectedness: ‘It will be another 10 years before what I’m hoping for will happen. It will have grown out of the people. I’m trying to create a monastery of the streets, a monastery of the community, where the whole environment is conducive to the raising of the bodhi-mind.’

Article by Vishvapani

first published in Dharma Life Magazine No. 6, Winter 1997

A wraith-like figure stands before a fireball sky. Everything is reeling and distorted. The figure’s hands clasp its head, blackened lips gape open and pinhead eyes fix the viewer. He’s screaming.

On Thursday an anonymous buyer bought Munch’s The Scream for £74 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. Personally, I would pay good money not to have it gazing down at me, but there’s no denying its impact and popularity. We instantly grasp the feelings the painting expresses, and around that our culture has weaved further meanings that make The Scream an emblem of modern angst, torment and alienation.

The power of images lies in their capacity to express experiences and perceptions that words can’t capture. That’s why they’re so important for Buddhism. Today, Buddhists in many countries celebrate the festival of Wesak, or Buddha Day, which marks the Buddha’s Enlightenment. It’s the central event of Buddhist history, yet it’s hard to say clearly what happened. Buddhist teachings include many definitions of Enlightenment, but these stress that it transcends our normal ways of thinking.

However, images offer another way of approaching the Buddha’s state. A man sits upright in meditation posture. His eyes are half-open, suggesting the inward focus of his attention. He is poised, alert and one hand reaches down to touch the earth: the legends tell us he’s calling on the earth goddess to witness the authenticity of his state. His face is tranquil and the suggestion of a smile touches his lips.

When I first started to look at images of the Buddha, I sensed a connection between that inward gaze and the peace he exudes. By understanding himself, the image suggests, the Buddha has grasped a truth that’s greater than any individual and made peace with the world. The image doesn’t define Enlightenment, but in the hands of the greatest Buddhist artists, it vividly evokes it.

Contemplating images of the Buddha opened up for me the whole realm of visual imagination. In turn, that made western art more accessible. I learned that, if you let them affect you deeply enough, images can evoke fresh states of mind and convey meanings that elude your thinking brain. That’s true of The Scream, which evokes anguish, and also true of the utterly different images of the Buddha’s Enlightenment. They intimate a way of being I find deeply attractive and I want to realise in my own experience. That’s what I’ll be celebrating this Wesak.

Audio available here from Monday 7 may

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Christopher greeted me at his house in Totnes, southwest England, in a large black hat, long black raincoat, and trailing black scarf. A senior teacher in the Insight Meditation movement, Christopher is without the cool reserve of some of his contemporaries. In Buddhist circles he has dispensed with his surname and now prefers to be known simply as Christopher. He has large, friendly eyes and an immediately engaging manner. Engagement is one of his themes. ‘I recently told one Dharma group, ‘I think I prefer Moslems to Buddhists. At least they have some fire, some passion …’. It was a provocative way of saying that I think Buddhists can be so ‘nice’, and so passive.’

We met to discuss a book Christopher had published in 2002 in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, called Transforming Our Terror: a spiritual approach to making sense of senseless tragedy. ‘I have been visiting the US for 25 years, but mainly just to lead retreats. So the America I encounter is the American mind. And I noticed that after 9/11 there was a great deal more fear and anxiety among the people I was teaching. I started to ask myself, what can Buddhist practice say to this experience?’

The result is an enquiry into the nature of fear, grief, loss, and how the human mind processes and makes sense of them. In essence, Christopher suggests, the collective emotional response to the public trauma of the terrorist attacks mirrored the patterns of personal responses to grief that, in his book, he describes so well: ‘The sadness that permeates our hearts due to the arising of the unwelcome, the unwanted, and the unforeseen has a certain emotional weight that can bear down on us until we feel sick in our stomachs. Our chests contract and our heads feel stuffed full of unpleasant sensations. The overall pressure releases tears from our eyes as the breathtakingly painful information begins to sink deeper and deeper into our hearts.’

Implicit in the analogy between how an individual responds to suffering and how a community responds to a collective tragedy is a critique of the War on Terror that America launched in response to 9/11. ‘They decided that the way to combat their fear was to hit out. But that involves narrowing down imaginatively, cutting off from the suffering of the other person. In my book I have stories about the suffering of people in Palestine and Afghanistan, but when I submitted the manuscript, the US publisher wanted me to cut these out. Essentially they said, ‘Can you keep it just to the experience of Americans?’. But I replied, ‘What I am writing about is universal. The Dharma doesn’t distinguish between Americans or Afghanis. All it knows about is human beings – their minds and their suffering.’ Eventually, when I gave an ultimatum, ‘Publish everything or nothing’, they backed down and it was printed. But this was an insight into the atmosphere in America after 9/11 and the unconscious forces of censorship that have taken hold.’

I was struck by the eloquence of Christopher’s descriptions of grief and sadness, and I asked if they grew from his own experiences. Surprisingly, he answered in the negative. ‘I seem to be blessed with a happy, equanimous inner life, and of course I have put in many years of hard-core Dharma practice. I can’t remember the last time I found something hard to bear, or I suffered.’ Christopher spent six years in the 1970s as a Theravadin Buddhist monk in Thailand, where he studied Vipassana meditation under Ajahn Dhammadharo and Essence of Dharma under Ajahn Buddhadasa, and in India. Since then he has been based at Gaia House in Devon and taught meditation in centres around the world. As well as this he has been an energetic activist, mediating in conflict situations and an energetic campaigner for peaceful solutions.

Christopher’s assertion that he experiences little or no suffering is all the more striking as his life has not been without difficulty. Recently he was suspended as a teacher by Gaia House and another leading insight meditation retreat centre, following an allegation by a female student that he ‘pursued her and avoided her’ during a weekend retreat.

He commented, ‘I believe in the intimacy of offering wholehearted attention to a person rather than becoming a detached professional. I regard this as the essence of being a kalyana mitra [good spiritual friend] to others. We have to take the risk that we will be misunderstood and accept the consequences.

‘The institution feels it needs to protect its reputation. But losing a place to teach is pretty insignificant if you think that in the end we will lose everything! Our life is a dewdrop hanging on the end of a leaf at dawn. Our dissolution from this garden of life is always soon.’ The other centres where Christopher teaches did not think the complaint warranted such a response, and he continues his world-wide teaching programme.

Rather than through his own personal suffering, Christopher suggests that his encounter with the painful emotions he describes has come principally through listening to the experience of others. ‘I learn so much through listening to the grief, sorrow and terror of people I work with. I practise the art of witnessing their experience, just as in meditation you witness the thoughts and feelings that arise, while neither becoming lost in them nor cutting off from them.’

Instead of responding to pain and loss with anger or dejection, Buddhist psychology suggests that awareness is the key to a more creative response. Christopher returns repeatedly to this theme of witnessing, evoking the biblical resonances of ‘bearing witness’. In Transforming Our Terror he writes, ‘The true witness is not passive, but tries to take an overview and maintains a sense of caring responsibility for the totality of the event, free from bias.’ In some accounts such awareness can seem cool and detached, but Christopher emphasises sensitivity to experience and – that dangerous word again – ‘intimacy’ with it. ‘Intimacy is an important word for me. Through awareness we can learn to be intimate with nature, with the elements, and with our bodies – in the same way as we think of developing intimacy with another person. That intimacy opens us to the sense of presence and humanity here, right now, in this moment. That intimacy with life lies at the heart of what it is to be human.’

The same quality of awareness without detachment has prompted Christopher’s peace work, the practical corollary of his arguments in Transforming Our Terror. He has travelled for many years to Israel and the West Bank where he works closely with the peace movement and others on both sides of the divide. ‘Recently I gave a public talk in Tel Aviv, and I said, ‘The Israeli military must get out of the West Bank, and allow the Palestinians to live their lives. Soldiers must refuse to support the occupation.’

‘One man came up to me afterwards, very angry, and asked, ‘Who do you think you are to come here and tell us what to do? What do you know about the situation?’ I asked him, ‘How many Palestinians have you met and asked what their lives are like?’ I could see from his face that he had never spoken to any; so I said, ‘I go and listen to the nightmare of the Palestinians, as well as hear from Israelis about their sorrow. That is my authority to speak on such matters. Do you have the authority to speak about the terror of the Palestinians? No, you don’t.’ ‘

How can a Buddhist mediate between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East? Christopher emphasises that he isn’t looking for converts. ‘I tell people, ‘You already have three religions, the last thing you need is a fourth!’. I guide people in looking at their responses and their minds, and sometimes they want to know more. So I have been asked to lead retreats in Israel, making available the Buddha’s insights, but without any expectation that people will become Buddhists.

‘It is a delicate position. In Nablus, where I give workshops on the resolution of suffering, the Palestinians know I am totally supportive of their right to liberation, independence and to live in peace, and the Israelis know that I am wholly supportive of their right to exist.’

Listening to others parallels the act of listening to oneself in meditation, and Christopher advocates an open questioning attitude: ‘How do we find a different way of looking? How do we witness what is happening without taking sides? What leads us to believe and accept a particular version of reality?’ Such questioning points to the Buddhist emphasis on examining and letting go of divisive views. ‘Again and again in Buddhist texts the Buddha asks us to look at our views,’ Christopher commented. ‘This isn’t the same as being non-judgemental – which is what so many western Buddhists are advocating. The Buddha was always criticising the views that were prevalent in his society, saying they led people into suffering. Far too many Buddhists live in fear of appearing judgmental. There is an inability to distinguish between critical, passionate analysis and heaping blame upon others. The first step on the Noble Eightfold Path is Right View, not timid view, not comforting view and not non-view.’

Among the reflections Christopher is most keen to promote is contemplating birth, ageing, pain and death to generate love and compassion amid the vulnerability of daily life. ‘In Vipassana monasteries in Asia you can see corpses, sometimes those of senior monks or lay people, to remind you of the truth of impermanence. Contemplating death is the most profound meditation because it has the power to cut through all your ideas about yourself, your plans, your self-importance – everything you get caught up with and think matters.’

Christopher is convinced that such meditative insights have much to offer the political domain. ‘However sophisticated our technology, the level of emotional maturity guiding the political courses of our countries is low. There is no attempt to understand the ‘other’, to ask how others may see us and what we may have done to prompt their anger. Until we can look inside and see how we deal with our own anger and forces of destruction (often disguised by politicians and others as making hard decisions about the real world), we will continue to see its painful consequences in the world outside us.’

Above all, this entails honest, rigorous self-enquiry. As he writes, ‘A major catastrophe gives us the opportunity to enquire into our relationship with our beliefs, feelings and opinions. It also acts as a metaphor for other situations of conflict or a seemingly insoluble position.’

For all the positivity of its message, Transforming Our Terror is pervaded by a sad awareness that, far from seizing this opportunity, our political leaders chose to hurl themselves into a cycle of punishment, retribution and the attempt to control. What can one do in response? Christopher’s activism has made him a veteran of Dharma Yatras, or peace pilgrimages, which are walked in many countries. And he recently contributed to a bill currently making its way through the British parliament that proposes to establish a UK Ministry of Peace, dedicated to finding non-violent solutions to international conflicts.

Along with a teaching programme in which he lead meditation retreats on four continents, Christopher’s activism makes him an incessant traveller, who draws breath when he lands back in his beloved Totnes. I leave him at the station, scarf trailing behind him. He is off to his daughter’s house, then on to his regular window seat in the local coffee shop. There he sits, as he has for several years, meeting and engaging with old friends, Dharma students or anyone who wants to chat, with a warm greeting and a welcoming smile.

This image of Christopher encapsulates his message for meditators, politicians and all of us who need to absorb our experience, with its many difficulties. Staying open, not closing down, and bearing witness to whatever life brings.

Read Christopher Titmuss’ Dharma blog and listen to his talks

This article first appeared in Dharma Life magazine

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Thought for the Day 25/4/2012

Dachau. Chernobyl. Hiroshima. The very names of these places have an unsettling resonance. They embody the worst horrors that might befall us, yet growing numbers visit the sites each year. There’s even a name for the phenomenon: ‘Dark Tourism’; and yesterday we heard that a Dark Tourism Research Centre is opening in Lancashire. But are our visits to such places morbid, or are they a new form of pilgrimage?

Some years ago I spent a week with a Buddhist-led interfaith group at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Members of my family died in the Holocaust and I wanted to participate, though I didn’t know why.

Images of that visit are still vivid. A pile of spectacles taken from the dead heaped up like a mound of insects; the constriction of the punishment cells; the unutterable bleakness of the Execution wall. When we visited nearby Berkenau I was unprepared for the camp’s orderliness; its barbarous symmetry; the implacable barbed wire fences; and the wretchedness of the barracks.

Why go? The question was present throughout my visit. Was I trying to confront the world’s darkness? Or my own? Was it about understanding how people can do such things, or learning lessons that might stop them happening again? None of that seemed important as I sat with others in the grounds of Berkenau, meditating and performing simple rituals. I’ve learned through Buddhist practice that the urge to make sense of or resolve something troubling can be a subtle attempt to control it and make it go away. Sometimes you simply need to pay attention without interpreting and see what happens.

It helped that we spent several days in Berkenau to sit with and absorb the experience. You can’t do that on a daytrip. Sometimes I felt rooted and whole, as if I could encompass the place’s horror, but more often I felt baffled and overwhelmed. Then my  attention would slip and familiar preoccupations filled my thoughts. One thing that did make sense was mourning my grandfather and other Holocaust victims and I found, to my surprise, that Jewish prayers helped me do that more than Buddhist chants.

Buddhist monks sometimes meditate in cremation grounds surrounded by corpses as a way of facing death. My visit to Auschwitz felt more like that than tourism, however ‘dark’. But perhaps all such visits ultimately reflect an intuition that, to be whole we must face our selves and the world as they really are, including dark as well as light and concentration camps as well as beauty.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s Buddhism

In her political philosophy Suu Kyi acknowledges her debts to two precursors: her father and Mahatma Gandhi. But behind these influences is a serious attempt to act from Buddhist principles. As a result she has been able to maintain a consistent position that is based soundly on ethical values, and to exemplify those values in her own actions. It was through acting with Buddhist principles that she was able not only to focus the opposition movement, but to imbue it with her idealism.

‘The quintessential revolution’, she wrote, ‘is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in the mental attitudes which shape the course of a nation’s development. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces that produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative.

Many of Suu Kyi’s speeches have been directed not to the government but to the Burmese people, themselves, for she regards democracy as an expression of the people’s ability to take collective responsibility rather than merely a way of distributing power. Suu Kyi saw Burma as a country ‘where intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and keep silent.’

She summed up a sophisticated analysis of this situation in a single sentence: ‘It is not power that corrupts but fear.’ The tyranny was the product of fear and it had sapped their strength. She encouraged them to relearn the habits of taking individual responsibility that were manifest in Burma’s past.

For Suu Kyi, the goal of the democracy movement was not to defeat the military but to restore harmony. Violence was, therefore, not an option for the protesters – but non-violence was not just another political method. The fundamental task was to ensure that any actions they took sprang from a skillful motivation. Even while troops were firing on demonstrators, Suu Kyi urged the crowd not to lose their affection for the army.

From a Buddhist perspective desirable ends cannot justify unethical means: ethical action is an end in itself. ‘Just continue to do what you believe is right,’ she told one rally. ‘Later the fruits of what you do will become apparent on their own. One’s responsibility is to do the right thing.’

Suu Kyi also saw the government’ violence as the product of fear. Without a popular mandate, its policies had to be imposed violently because: ‘the insecurity of life based on coercion translates into the need to crush all dissent.’ Using the central Buddhist tenet of true and false refuges, Suu Kyi argues that, by following materialistic and selfish aims, the government was pursuing false refuges that cannot provide any real security. She suggested that a true refuge is found in taking responsibility for one’s actions in the fullest sense and judging those actions in terms of their beneficial effects on others.

She also invoked the traditional Buddhist concept of the Just King, who seeks to manifest the qualities of generosity, ethical behaviour, selflessness and ‘non-opposition to the will of the people (which is often interpreted as an endorsement of democracy). ‘Rulers must observe the teaching of the Buddha. Central to these teachings are the concepts of truth, righteousness and loving-kindness. It is government based on these very qualities that the people of Burma are seeking … ‘

These might simply be fine sentiments, where it not for their rhetorical force in this context. Burma has been a Theravada Buddhist country for 2,000 years and Buddhism has affected every aspect of its traditional culture. Most men have spent time in the monastery when they were boys and often have further periods as monks in later life. As a Buddhist Suu Kyi is reviving native Burmese values that, she says, have lain dormant beneath military rule.

She has managed to translate traditional Buddhist concepts into the language of modern political struggle. The government often dismissed demands for democracy and human rights, calling them western notions for which Burmese people need have no regard. But Suu Kyi endorsed the need for human rights, which she views as an expression of Buddhist principles. ‘Buddhism places the greatest value on man who, alone of all beings, can gain Buddhahood.’

This synthesis of Buddhism and modern political concepts has allowed her to generalize the significance of the struggle. ‘The quest for democracy in Burma I the struggle of a people to live whole, meaningful lives as free and equal members of the world community. It is part of the unceasing human endeavour to prove that the spirit of man can transcend the flaws of his nature.’

Burma’s troubles extend much further than political persecution, and Suu Kyi’s Buddhist approach also sheds a broader light. She connects the country’s economic malaise with a myopia consequent on the government’s self-interest. ‘A narrowly-focused self interest that seeks to block out all considerations apparently irrelevant to one’s own well-being tends finally to block out what is, in fact, most relevant’. She argues that, lacking the discipline of accountability, the generals actions have been arbitrary and inconsistent. The result is that investors have lost confidence in the country’s economy and the Burmese have lost a sense of involvement in their fortunes. In this way, the generals have undermined the very conditions on which economic development depends.

It is true that Suu Kyi’s philosophy has not been tested by the realities of power. But by embodying her principles Suu Kyi has been able to maintain a moral stature that is the foundation of her political strength. When she first appeared on the political scene, one Burmese observer said: ‘We listened to her words and then to the words of the generals and we knew in our hearts who was the better person.’ Her idealism is extensive, but it is not extravagant. As she says, ‘If people and nations cultivated a generous spirit which welcomes the happiness of others as an enhancement to the happiness of the self, many seemingly insoluble problems would prove less intractable.’

read Part 1

An earlier version of this article appeared in Dharma Life magazine Issue 1

Pt 1 Who is Aung San Suu Kyi?

The image of Suu Kyi’s diminutive frame, carried with extraordinary poise and imbued with iron determination, has become emblematic of the Burmese struggle. In photographs her grave, penetrating eyes gaze across crowds for whom she is the embodiment of their aspirations. Stories have gathered around her. The most famous is of an incident in 1989 when she was walking down a street with her followers and a party of soldiers jumped from a Jeep, assumed a kneeling position and took aim, while the commanding officer barked out a countdown to fire. She motioned the others aside and walked calmly down the centre of the road towards the soldiers. ‘It seemed simpler to provide them with a single target,’ she said. At the last moment a major intervened to stop the soldiers shooting.

During the six years that Suu Kyi was under house arrest, she was hailed as both a human rights activist and a resistance leader in the mould of Nelson Mandela. She was awarded the Sakharov and Rafto prizes as a political dissident and the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. What is less frequently mentioned is that she is a Buddhist and her philosophy of non-violent opposition is expounded in explicitly Buddhist terms. She has to negotiate the difficult relationship between the Dharma and politics.

As she told the New York Times:

‘If you’re meditating and a mosquito comes and bites you, you have to think “Biting … biting … biting …. And you are aware that the mosquito is biting and you just keep sitting there. Politics is not like that. We try everything we can not hurt others and create feelings of antipathy. But if people are doing things that are unacceptable … we can’t just sit there and say, “They are doing it … they are doing it … they are doing it … ”’

Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Aung San, the creator of Burma’s army and leader of resistance to the Japanese and then the British occupation. He is revered as the father of the Burmese nation. He was assassinated at the age of 32 (when Suu Kyi was just two years old) after a life of extraordinary achievement. His daughter was brought up as a devout Buddhist  and educated in Calcutta and Oxford, before working for three years at The United Nations. She returned to Oxford to marry Michael Arris, an eminent Tibetologist, and then raised a family. She also continued her studies, fired by a desire to understand her father’s life and to comprehend the forces at work in her country. When the time came she was well-prepared.

That moment arrived with the 1988 ‘Democracy Movement’ against Burma’s dictators. Since 1962 the country had been ruled by the repressive military government of General Ne Win. It had declined from being one of the richest countries in Asia to one of the poorest in the world, on a par with Ethiopia and Chad. Its greatest asset – universal education based around the study of Buddhism – was stifled. By spring 1988 (the year of Glasnost and the prelude to Tienanmen Square) a new opposition movement demanding democracy and economic reform had started among Rangoon students.

Protests were met with violence and those arrested were often subject to rape and torture. In a series of huge demonstrations in the first weeks of August 1988, several thousand people, including Buddhist monks, were shot dead by government troops. The demonstrations, which had started peacefully, turned to violence as protesters threw stones and poison darts and even beheaded people. The protests expressed decades of accumulated rage at government violence, corruption and dictatorship, but they had no clear agenda. The opposition seemed to be heading for chaos and the country for civil war.

As these events were unfolding, Suu Kyi has returned to Rangoon from the UK to nurse her dying mother. She chose this moment to intervene, proposing a framework for discussion and urging restraint from violence from all parties. Then she made a public address (the first of more than a thousand in the following year)to a crowd of several hundred thousand people in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda the country’s foremost Buddhist monument. Her message was an appeal for restraint, discipline, the abandonment of violence and a clarification of the protest movement’s aims, which emphasised democracy and human rights.

Supported by her father’s reputation and her own moral stature, Suu Kyi’s ideas started to have an effect. For a while it seemed that, as the daughter of the country’s military hero, she could mediate between the generals and the people. In September 1988 she formed the National League for Democracy (NLD) together with senior disaffected military figures and by October the leaders of the protest movement had renounced violence and were seeing Suu Kyi as their natural leader. In July 1989, after a year of nationwide campaigning in the face of government obstruction, she was forcibly confined to her house, while her fellow NLD leaders were imprisoned. The government called elections, thinking that, with the opposition leaders in prison, their own candidates would dominate. In the event the NLD won 80 percent of the votes and its allies, representing minority ethnic groups, another 14  percent. The government declared the result void and redoubled its efforts to crush the opposition.

The international community responded with condemnation and, eventually, sanctions. But the Burmese government consolidated its position and Suu Kyi remained under house arrest. Little changed for nearly two decades, until the protest movements of 2008 and the dramatic events of spring 2012. Suu Kyi has remained the Burmese opposition’s leader, even when communication was impossible. Now she is able to return centre stage and reiterate her Buddhist message.

Part 2: Aung San Suu Kyi’s Buddhism

An earlier version of this article appeared in Dharma Life magazine Issue 1

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Courses

Cardiff May 17-July 5 8 Thursday evenings. 7.00-9.00, Cardiff Buddhist Centre, Roath

Bristol May 12-July 14  5 Sat afternoons. 1.15-5.15, Bristol Buddhist Centre, Bishopston

Lunchtime Course Central Cardiff June 23-July 10 5 Tuesday lunchtimes 1.00-2.00, Cardiff Friends Meeting House (off Queen St).

Introductory Days

Cardiff, Saturday April 28

10.00-4.30, Cardiff Yoga Studio, Roath

Bristol, Saturday May 5

10.00-4.30, Bristol Buddhist centre, Bishopston. Ked by Nagabodhi and Vimalachitta of Mindfulness West

Week-long Summer Intensive MBSR Course 

Brecon Monday 2 – Friday 6 July

We’ll cover the eight week course over five days. Co-led with Vicki Worsley of Mindful Space

You can also learn mindfulness with Mindfulness in Action in several other ways 

1-to-1 Mindfulness coaching 

Thought for the Day 14/4/2012

David Cameron’s moving meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday evoked memories of her epic struggle and symbolised the hope that Burma may really be changing. The Prime Minister called her inspirational, and so, we may add, are her colleagues and the young Buddhist monks who led the 2008 protests.

But  I sometimes feel uneasy about the coverage of these developments. The Burmese struggle can be depicted as a battle between benign, non-violent Buddhists and evil, unprincipled despots. That fits Buddhism’s romanticized popular image and it’s good publicity in a way; but it’s also unrealistic and sentimental. We forget that the Burmese generals are devout Buddhists themselves. Their corrupt, thuggish regime has ruled in the name of Buddhism and often been supported by the Buddhist establishment. This struggle isn’t between Buddhists and their opponents but between different kinds of Buddhists.

The ruling generals adopted a leading role in Burma’s religious life: building huge Buddhist monuments, giving generously to monasteries and fitting themselves to the archetype of the Dharmaraja, the righteous king who upholds virtue and religion. All this, according to the traditional way of thinking, gained them karmic merit and will help them to a better rebirth. Monastic organisations were silenced and controlled by the government. Some monks understandably acquiesced for fear of arrest and torture, perhaps believing that their true role lay outside the public sphere. But many worked with the regime, actively legitimizing their rule, and in return Buddhist institutions were handsomely rewarded.

On the other side, the opposition finds in Buddhist teachings a critique of military rule and a rationale for democracy and non-violence. Aung San Suu Kyi says that Buddhist practice gave her a moral compass and inner strength. She has long argued that Buddhism could help the Burmese shake off their fear, and she echoed that yesterday in speaking of the ‘revolution of the spirit’ at work in the country.

Among other things, the Burmese struggle is about what Buddhism should look like in the modern world. I believe that Buddhism’s radical and original teachings have much to offer, but Burma shows the urgent need to reform much traditional Buddhism: the kind that entwines its teachings with ways of thinking that can end up legitimizing tyranny. The alternative offered by Aung San Suu Kyi and others shows that its teachings remain relevant to the most difficult situations, but only if we as Buddhists can look honestly at our beliefs, discard time-honoured practices if they are flawed and take our stand on Buddhism’s essential principles.

My next Thought for the Day talks will be April 25 and May 5

Aung San Suu Kyi’s Buddhist Politics

In the last post I described some tendencies in our culture that underlie emotional and psychological difficulties:

• Acute mental suffering and mental distress are very common – more than we may realise
• We’re compulsively focused on activity and stimulation
• Many people are often awfully hard on themselves
• Resisting and avoiding difficulties is the source of many psychological problems

Mindfulness Based Approaches have developed because Buddhist meditation and mindfulness practices turn out to be excellent remedies – provided they are offered in the right way. Like standard Buddhist meditation, MBAs start with practices that cultivate stillness, stabilise attention and encourage a degree of concentration. In itself, this is an alternative to the compulsive activity and stimulation of the doing mode. Then, like Buddhist satipatthana practice (but unlike some other approaches to meditation), MBAs encourage a broad awareness of thoughts and feelings and an engagement with them that counters the tendencies that cause stress, depression and so on.

The key to teaching meditation in this context is that the techniques of meditation are much less important than helpful mental attitudes. Jon Kabat Zinn cites the attitudes of curiosity, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving and letting go as well as three that I want to discuss here: acceptance, being non-judgmental and being kind to yourself.

Acceptance or Moving Towards the Difficult

Buddhist teachings have always emphasised the importance of regarding pleasure and pain equanimously, avoiding attachment or aversion. MBSR and MBCT add to this the need to move towards and actively explore difficult experience. They use Buddhist samatha techniques to help people stabilise their attention and, on this basis, to engage with difficult and troubling thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. I realise that many other meditation teachers do something similar, but many don’t and I associate the growing popularity of this approach with the influence of MBAs.

The ‘clinical’ observation behind this emphasis is that people who experience stress, anxiety etc. are, on some level, avoiding their true experience and this is a significant cause of their problems. Conversely, allowing yourself to experience difficulties more fully – facing them directly, moving towards them, inviting them in (pick your metaphor) – is essential if you want to tackle your stress. Contrary to some people’s impressions, MBAs don’t offer a crowd-pleasing agenda. Most people who enroll on my MBSR courses think they’ll learn a form of relaxation, and they learn that, while relaxation may arise, it isn’t the goal of the practice.

 Being Non-judgmental

Jon Kabat Zinn defines meditation as present moment, non-judgmental awareness. Self-hatred manifests as harsh, emotionally-laden judgments of one’s experience – ‘being judgmental’ – which prevents you from being fully aware of it or in a position to change it. As an MBSR teacher you learn to notice when a person’s description of their experience includes this sort of judgment; you encourage them to notice their judging tendency; and you guide them towards a non-interpretive and non-judgmental relationship with their experience.

Being non-judgmental doesn’t mean not making judgments. It means letting go of unskillful and largely unconscious responses that express themselves as an emotionally-laden judgments. The alternative, experiencing with mindfulness, is a basis for making wise judgments. This is a helpful distinction because it clarifies the role of judgment in Buddhist practice as well as in MBAs, and its near enemy.

Being non-judgmental doesn’t mean ‘accepting yourself’ in a passive sense. It also needn’t mean believing that you are intrinsically pure, good or enlightened, though Jon Kabat Zinn often uses such language. Personally, I don’t think those views are an essential part of MBAs.

Being Kind to Yourself

Because the self-judgments associated with stress, depression etc express harmful, unskillful emotions, countering them requires an alternative emotional tone: one of kindness. In MBSR and MBCT this is implicit in the method of moving towards difficult experience without judging it and embodied in the trainer’s responses to what participants say, especially when they are encountering difficulties.

In some MBAs kindness practices are taught explicitly, and in fact there is considerable debate about whether and how to include them. I have found this discussion helpful in teaching mettabhavana (loving kindness meditation). When people who are prone to depression take up mettabhavana their tendency to make harsh self-judgments can flavour their practice. The first stage becomes an impossible challenge and far from fostering metta it reinforces the belief that there’s something wrong with you. I don’t conclude that you shouldn’t teach mettabhavana or even that it is unsuited to people with depression. But MBSR has taught me to be alert to the underlying attitudes a person brings to meditation practice and it has given me ways to engage with them.

Teaching Methods

As this account of MBAs shows, the didactic content of the course is less important than the attitudes it encourages. Those attitudes are implicit in the practices and as the trainer shows participants what they mean. I won’t say much more as this is a large topic and not easy to articulate, but I think Buddhists can learn much from MBSR teaching methods, especially the ‘enquiry’ process: exploring with a participant the experience they describe, responding to it with mindfulness and modelling how they might do that as well. Teaching mindfulness and meditation are arts, not reduce able to techniques; but techniques help if they express what an intuitive and highly effective teacher naturally does. That’s what I find in MBSR.

There are other ways to teach mindfulness and meditation than the MBSR way, and its emphases have drawbacks. Exploring them properly will require another article, so I’ll just acknowledge that it is a gentle, receptive approach, rather than a dynamic, questing one, and that both ways have merits. MBSR shares many merits with Buddhist satipatthana  (mindfulness) practice but my point in these two posts has been that it also has has a particular value in working with the kind of mental suffering that is so common in modern society.

In my last post I said why I think the mindfulness boom is the most significant development in Buddhism’s encounter with the West for many years. However, the secular mindfulness movement isn’t Buddhism; it’s the discovery within healthcare, psychology and the broader culture that certain Buddhist practices and attitudes can help them achieve their goals: good physical and mental health and general wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, Buddhists are both excited by and wary of the growing interest in mindfulness. I’ll be writing about the limits and dangers of secular mindfulness training, but I want to start by saying what I have learned from it and what  I think other Buddhists could profitably learn

Over the years, I’ve been involved in many experiments in re-expressing Buddhism within western culture  - with its own art, myths,  philosophy and economic structures. I believe we must apply Buddhist teachings to the true concerns of the modern world, adapting its expressions without compromising their essential message. That means engaging with the psychological and emotional issues confronting people in our culture. Buddhist teachings typically describe universal psychological traits; but some issues are particular to certain individuals and some vary between cultures.

But what is the distinctive psychology of our society? One source of insight  is clinical psychology. It has no monopoly of authority and it brings certain biases and assumptions, but adds elements to which Buddhist teachers have no other access, such as empirical research and specialist understanding of psychological problems. In my my training in MBAs I’ve encountered the following observations and findings.

Some Observations

i. Acute mental suffering and mental distress are very common – more than we may realise

According to Mark Williams, one in ten British people will experience depression in the next year, and there’s a 50 percent chance of recurrence; the average level of anxiety in children and young people would have been considered clinical in the 1950s. And in the US, 75 – 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress related problems. We could add that 15-20 percent of the population also experience some degree of chronic pain, and this mental suffering and coping mechanisms that are comparable to those involved in the various forms of psychological distress.

These statistics tell us much about the people who attend Buddhist centres; in fact, it one would expect more suffering than average among people who are seeking relief from it.  In return, Buddhists offer meditation, Dharma insights and hopefully friendship and community. But we aren’t trained to address people’s psychological problems directly or guide them in using meditation practices to address very difficult states of mind.

ii. We’re compulsively focused on activity and stimulation

Jon Kabat Zinn identifies ‘the doing mode’ as the characteristic feature of modern living, contrasting it with the mindful ‘being mode’. That’s a bit vague and open to misunderstanding, but it’s still a helpful encapsulation of many of our society’s dysfunctional features. Doing mode could be equated with what Buddhism calls the mental hindrances of desire for sense experience and restlessness and anxiety. I would add that we have objectified these mental tendencies in consumer culture, sexualisation, the entertainment industry and the demands on our attention of advertising, news, social networking and so on. MBAs have helped me understand how this compulsive activity leads to mental distress and how mindfulness can help.

iii. Many people are often awfully hard on themselves

MBSR and MBCT are based on the finding that persistent, harsh, emotionally driven self-criticism is common and lies behind many psychological difficulties. Our interpretations of our experience are affected by this self criticism and anything at all can feed a tendency towards self-hatred, including meditation. If your aim in meditating is to fix the weakness and unworthiness you see in yourself, as if your very being was a kind of a problem, you may make progress in some areas but that underlying aversion will remain.

iv. Resisting and avoiding difficulties is the source of many psychological problems

Buddhist teaching knows all about aversion: the tendency to avoid what is happening through hatred or distraction. What (some) psychologists add is that this avoidance lies behind many psychological problems. The mental processes we employ to eradicate suffering in fact produce ingrained traits, creating states such as depression, stress, acute anxiety and the behaviour associated with OCD. For example, the founders of MBCT argue that depression develops when a person responds to a difficulty by ruminating – turning it over in the mind in a way that reinforces low mood and encourages harsh self-views.

In the next post I will describe some of the remedies that MBAs offer, especially focusing on what is distinctive about them.