Boris Johnson declared that July 19 2021 would be Freedom Day, but dropped the term as the virus started to spread again. So what is true freedom from a Buddhist perspective?
It’s 14th July, Quatorze Juillet, when France marks the storming of the Bastille in the name of ‘liberté, égalité and fraternité’. Meanwhile, in Cuba crowds are shouting Libertad! And England is just a few days from the relaxation that some people are still calling ‘Freedom Day’.
The desire for liberty goes deep. It’s the shared motto of revolutionaries who ‘Cry Freedom’ and Cold War defenders of ‘the Free World’. But what is this liberty for which we yearn? I’m as eager as anyone to get past Covid, eat out and go the theatre; but the risk of spreading the virus constrains our freedom. Your desire to be free from infection impacts my freedom not to wear a mask. If liberty means the absence of constraints, it’s surely an impossible ideal.
Buddhism approaches freedom rather differently. In Buddhist teachings, normal human experience is itself a state of imprisonment. They identify a number of fetters, using the same metaphor as William Blake when he speaks of ‘mind-forged manacles’. We could render the first of these as ‘habit’: all the ways we fix ourselves, doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts. Then there’s the fetter of superficiality, or taking things at face value without looking more deeply. And third is doubt or vagueness: not really knowing what we think about things and acting halfheartedly.
This way of thinking locates the principal barriers to freedom within ourselves, in our responses, rather than in external conditions. Buddhists are sometimes accused of believing that we should meditate blithely while the world burns, rather than actively extinguishing the flames. I prefer to see the Buddhist perspective as an expansion of what we can influence through greater self-awareness.
To be free in the Buddhist sense is to be liberated from the desire to do whatever we want. It demands the discipline that helps us break habits and avoid reactions, freeing us to respond in a way that’s creative, clear and wholehearted. This kind of freedom has little to do with whether we’re obliged to wear face-masks. It means facing reality with all its constraints.
The change from Freedom Day to Cautious Monday shows us that a free society is defined not just by what we are at liberty to do, but by our shared capacity to navigate together the constraints we cannot avoid.
